University of Lincoln RIF Studentships 2014
PROJECT DETAILS
Project Title
Inter-species emotional understanding across life span
Project Reference
RIF2014S-23
Project Summary
Appropriate interspecies emotional understanding is essential to maintaining a
satisfying human-dog relationship and the associated health benefits. However, we
know little about this social cognitive process and age-related changes in human and
dog subjects.
Applications are invited for a PhD studentship in the School of Psychology, University
of Lincoln, supervised by Dr Kun Guo and Professor Daniel Mills, to examine how
people and dog use visual and auditory cues to understand each other’s emotion and
intention. The project will focus upon cognitive and aging factors, and involve some
mixture of eye-tracking, psychological testing and behavioural observation.
Dogs are playing an increasingly important role in our lives and appropriate
interspecies emotional understanding is essential to maintaining a good human-dog
relationship and the associated health benefits.
Dogs’ value as field models of human behaviour and cognition is also being
increasingly realised by researchers. This comparative study aims to examine an
important issue (emotion perception) in comparative psychology whilst also opening
up the potential for dogs to be used as a new model of human age-related changes,
beyond their well-established value as models of Alzheimer’s.
Specifically, we will investigate how aging affects emotion perception in humans and
dogs, with a view to exploring the potential to develop dogs as an animal model for
non-invasive research examining the impact of aging on social cognitive abilities and
interventions.
We are seeking a highly-motivated, enthusiastic PhD student, with strong written and
oral presentation skills, a good grounding in experimental psychology, animal
cognition or animal behaviour.
Supervisory Team
1. Dr. Kun Guo , Reader, Lincoln School of Psychology.
http://staff.lincoln.ac.uk/kguo
2. Prof. Daniel Mills, Professor of Veterinary Behavioural Medicine, Lincoln School of
Life Sciences. http://staff.lincoln.ac.uk/dmills
Informal Enquiries
Please contact Dr. Kun Guo for informal enquiries by email: kguo@lincoln.ac.uk or
telephone: +44 (0)1522 886294.
Eligibility
All Candidates must satisfy the University’s minimum doctoral entry criteria for
studentships of an honours degree at Upper Second Class (2:1) or an appropriate
Masters degree or equivalent. A minimum IELTS (Academic) score of 7 (or
equivalent) is essential for candidates for whom English is not their first language.
Funded Studentships are open to both UK/EU students unless otherwise specified.
How to Apply
Please send a covering letter outlining your interest and proposed approach (up to 1
page A4) with an accompanying CV to studentshipscss@lincoln.ac.uk by close of
day on 18th April 2014.
Candidates will be notified w/c 5th May of the outcome of the process and if invited to
interview, these are anticipated to take place w/c 26h May.