pathway: Psychology Alumni

My research is focused on the role of parents in the development of child PTSD following child trauma. Previous research suggests a link between parental responses to child trauma and subsequent child post-traumatic stress symptoms. Therefore, my research aims to create an online intervention targeting parental responses to child trauma in the early post-trauma. The intervention will be co-designed in with families and clinicians, through collaboration with the Emergency Department at the Bristol Royal Hospital for Children. Through my research I hope to implement this intervention into routine services for trauma-exposed children.

My research seeks to discover whether there is compelling evidence for associative processes in humans. We know that humans can learn associations between things via a verbal, propositional process, as we often reason to ourselves why two things are related. However, the existence of a subconscious associative process, that automatically builds associations without relying upon conscious knowledge, is questioned. My research will use behavioural, neuroscientific, and computational techniques to provide evidence toward this, and in doing so resolve the larger ongoing debate as to whether single or dual-process accounts of learning and memory are the better model for human cognition.

Existing studies of brain structure in individuals with severe antisocial behaviour (e.g., youths with Conduct Disorder, adults with Antisocial Personality Disorder) are not entirely consistent. Therefore, as part of the ENIGMA-Antisocial Behaviour working group (http://enigma.ini.usc.edu/ongoing/enigma-antisocial-behavior/), the aim of my PhD research is to meta-analyse neuroimaging data from research groups across the world to identify brain structure alterations that are reliably associated with antisocial behaviour and factors that influence brain structure in this population. I hope that my findings will improve our understanding of the biological correlates of antisocial behaviour and inform diagnosis, prevention, and intervention.

Depression frequently starts during adolescence, and fatigue is one of the nine main symptoms. Despite indications that many adolescents with depression also report problematic fatigue, it is often not routinely addressed or treated in public healthcare services for children and adolescents with mental health difficulties. Minimal research has been conducted in this area, so there are many unanswered questions as to the importance of fatigue in adolescent depression, including how it is experienced, identified, and treated. The aim of my PhD is to begin addressing this gap in our knowledge by exploring fatigue as a common symptom in adolescent depression.

My research will explore novel ways to quantify autism-related personality traits and their relationships with several socially relevant phenomena.

I am interested in the underlying processes of social categorization. I will look at how formal models of category learning, e.g. prototype models, can explain social categorization problems of between-group discrimination. My research exclusively focuses on problems: where participants generalize their experience to novel ambiguous items, and where responses are irrational or suboptimal – contradict to rational models, like Classical Probability Theory. The project’s backbone includes a large-scale model comparison across social categorization problems. But I will also extensively employ Open Science and Open Source practices to battle the problem of replicability and reproducibility in Psychology.

The topic of my research is novel foods and how the emotion of disgust plays a role in mediating our interactions with these foods. I am particularly interested in novel proteins that are more environmentally sustainable and nutritious than conventionally consumed meats. Protein sources such as insects and cultured meat are often rejected by Western consumers as they are perceived as disgusting. The aim of my research is to first understand this food rejection and second, to investigate the usefulness of social and educational interventions to overcome the disgust response so that these sustainable sources of protein become more widely consumed.