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Research in the School of Psychology
The School of Psychology prides itself on its diverse research excellence and its strong national and international research links. School staff currently hold over $7 million in competitive research funding from government and industry sources. Over 30% of our staff are supported by prestigious Research Fellowships from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council and Cancer Australia.
The School provides a well-resourced and stimulating intellectual environment for research students and offers competitive top-up scholarships, teaching fellowships, and financial support to attend national and international conferences.
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Research Highlights
Recently awarded grants and fellowships
Recently published research
Recent PhD completions - Congratulations to:
- Martin Daly (PhD), Integrative Psychology: A comprehensive and practicable framework for the unification of psychology.
- Nicole Livermore (PhD), Panic-spectrum psychopathology in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: The applicability of the cognitive model.
- Sarah Maguire (DCP/PhD), The development of an instrument to assess severity of anorexia nervosa: The Clinician Administered Staging Instrument for Anorexia Nervosa (CASIAN).
- Jonathan Osbourne (DCP/MSc), Does a prior history of PTSD contribute to dementia symptomatology in World War II and Korean war veterans?
- Jane Rouse (PhD), Higher order cognition and moral judgement in preschool children.
- Rhea Stein (DCP/PhD), End-of-life decision-making: A randomised controlled trial of a structured intervention for patients living with advanced cancer.
- Jessica Taubert (PhD), A comparative approach to the composite face effect: A study of human and nonhuman behaviour.
- Petra van Nieuwenhuijzen (PhD), The effects of Gamma-Hydroxybutyrate (GHB) on brain and behaviour in rats
- Wu Yi Zheng (PhD), Mahjong gambling in the Chinese-Australian community in Sydney: Venturing into the unknown.
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Clinical
The research conducted by the Clinical Psychology Unit examines the psychological, sociocultural, emotional, intellectual, neuropsychological and behavioural aspects of human functioning in effort to promote understanding of various disorders, evidence based treatments, healthy development and adjustment. Academic staff members have interest and expertise in many different areas of adult and child clinical psychology and neuropsychology.
| Dr Maree Abbott |
Professor Alex Blaszczynski |
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- Anxiety and cognition
- Rumination in social phobia
- Intrusive thoughts, worry and generalized anxiety
- Perfectionism and procrastination
- Overeating/binge eating
- More information
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- Pathalogical gambling
- Impulse control behaviours
- Mental models of risk
- Post-traumatic stress
- Internet addiction
- More information
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| Dr David Hawes |
A/Prof Caroline Hunt |
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- Child psychopathology & conduct problems
- Parenting practices & behavioural parent training
- Psychopathy and callous-unemotional traits
- Child temperament, emotion processing, and empathy
- More information
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- Understanding factors involved in school-based bullying
- Anxiety, including models of pathological worry, procrastination
- More information
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| Dr Sunny Lah |
Dr Catalina Lawsin |
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- Neuropsychological rehabilitation
- Nature and mechanism of neuropsychological disorders arising from brain insults
- Memory deficits in neurological disorders
- More information
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- Quality of life among cancer survivors and families
- Psycho-social interventions pre and post treatment
- Systemic and socio-cultural factors influencing utilization of mental health
- Barriers to cancer screening among ethnic minorities and recent immigrants
- More information
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| Dr Paul Rhodes |
A/Prof Louise Sharpe |
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- Family-based treatment of anorexia nervosa
- Process research in family therapy
- Systemic approaches to chanllenging behaviour in developmental disabilities
- Teaching and supervision practices in family therapy
- More information
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- The efficacy of cognitive and/or behavioural treatments in the management of chronic pain and rheumatoid arthritis
- Understanding the process of adjustment in patients with rheumatoid arthritis and other illnesses
- The role of hypervigilance in the development, maintenance, prevention and treatment of chronic pain
- More information
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| Dr Marianna Szabo |
Professor Stephen Touyz |
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- Worry: relationship with problem solving and decision making; other cognitive aspects
- Children: developmental aspects of worry, anxiety and depression
- Depression
- More information
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- Eating disorders from the perspective of:
- clinical psychology
- psychiatry
- neuropsychology
- behavioural medicine
- More information
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| Dr Andrew Kemp |
Dr Niko Tiliopoulos |
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- Neuropsychiatry and mental health: understanding clinical depression and response to treatment using measures of brain and body function
- More information
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- Personality disorders - cluster A in the DSM-IV-TR
- Psychology & psychopathology of religion & spirituality
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| Dr Helen Paterson |
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- The effects of stress/trauma on memory
- The impact of post-incident debriefing on psychological wellbeing
- More information
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Cognition
Cognitive psychology explores the internal mental 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
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.
Health
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 psychologists are also interested in the analysis and improvement of the health care system and health policy formation.
| Professor Phyllis Butow |
Dr Ilona Juraskova |
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- Medical decision-making
- Doctor-patient communication
- Quality of life outcomes of cancer patients
- HPV vaccination: psychological impact
- More information
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| Prof Madeleine King |
Dr Barbara Mullan |
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- Impact of cancer on psychological, social and physical function
- Measurement issues in health-related quality of life and other self-reported health outcomes
- Patient preferences and utility estimation in health context, particularly cancer
- Decision aids to assist decision making for cancer patients
- More information
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- Social cognition models in health psychology
- The role of gender in health
- Gender issues in nursing and allied health professionals
- Sexuality and ill health
- Sex education
- Communication skills training
- More information
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| Dr Melanie Price |
Dr Margaret Charles |
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- Doctor-patient communication
- Communicating health risk information
- Health decision-making
- Health related Quality of Life
- More information
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- Relationship between social capital and psychological wellbeing
- Psychological aspects of palliative care
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| A/Prof Louise Sharpe |
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- Psychological impact of disease
- Development of interventions to facilitate adjustment to illness
- Evaluation of interventions for preventing physical and psychological morbidity in patients with ill health
- More information
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Learning
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.
Method & Theory
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
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.
| Professor Bernard Balleine |
Professor Ian Curthoys |
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- Neural basis of reward and reward prediction
- Prefrontal cortical involvement in the acquisition of instrumental conditioning
- The role of the thalamo-striatal pathway in instrumental conditioning
- Motivational control of Pavlovian conditioning
- More information
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- The anatomy and physiology of the vestibular system
- Vestibular loss and compensation
- Long-term potentiation (LTP)
- The role of the hippocampus in spatial memory
- The role of the hippocampus in spatial learning
- The neural basis of schizophrenia
- More information
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| Dr Ian Johnston |
Dr Andrew Kemp |
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- Cognitive and affective neuroscience: cognition and emotion perception, positive psychology, electroencephalography and event-related potentials
- Neuropsychiatry and mental health: understanding clinical depression and response to treatment using measures of brain and body function
- More information
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| Professor Iain McGregor |
Professor Robert Boakes |
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- Long term effects of party drugs on brain, cognition and behaviour
- Beer intake in rats: effects of anti craving drugs
- Beer intake in rats: effects of anti craving drugs
- Is the adolescent brain particularly susceptible to long-term adverse effects of cannabis
- The response of rats to predator odors: brain mechanisms and effects of anxiolytic drugs
- Isolation of pheromones from predators that produce defensive behaviors in rodents
- More information
- Psychopharmacology Lab
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| Dr Irina Harris |
A/Prof Justin Harris |
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- Neural processes (using TMS) underlying:
- object recognition
- Visual attention and selection
- Capacity limits in encoding visual information, repetition blindness, attentional blink
- More information
- Visual Cognition Lab
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| Dr Sunny Lah |
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- Neuropsychological rehabilitation
- Impact of neurological disorders and/or brain injury on psychological functioning
- More information
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Organisational
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.
| Dr Michael Cavanagh |
Dr Anthony Grant |
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- Coaching; workplace, life and health
- Meta-cognition and attention in self regulation and emotional regulation
- Client coach relationships
- Positive psychology, wellbeing and goal attainment
- Leadership and adult development
- Mindfulness
- Group functioning and team development
- More information
- The Coaching Psychology Unit
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- Life, workplace and executive coaching
- Socio-cognitive issues in the psychology of coaching and performance enhancement
- Trans-theoretical model of change
- Evaluation of personal development programs
- Applied positive psychology
- Insight and self-reflection
- More information
- The Coaching Psychology Unit
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Perception
The process by which signals from the sensory periphery (receptors in the eyes, ears, skin etc) are interpreted and organized 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.
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