Department of Psychology
News Archive 2008 – 2010
December 2010
Richard May, a PhD student in the Department (supervised by Dr Simon Dymond),
has been awarded a Sidney W. and Janet R. Bijou Fellowship from the Society for
the Advancement of Behavior Analysis. The Fellowship provides two, $5,000 grants
each year to doctoral students pursuing research on child development from a
behavior-analytic perspective.
Dr Simon Dymond has been awarded a €41,000 research grant from the Bial
Foundation for a collaborative project with Dr Newton, College of Medicine,
Swansea, and Dr Roche, NUI, Maynooth, entitled "Mapping the psychophysiology of
anxiety with virtual reality".
Dr Christoph Weidemann has been awarded a €48,000 research grant from the Bial
Foundation for a project titled "Investigation perceptual dynamics through 'mind
reading'".
Prof. Rodger Wood gave the keynote address to the Annual Meeting of the British
Society for Rehabilitation Medicine, at Coventry, in November 2010, on the subject –
The challenge of neurobehavioural disability after traumatic brain injury.
October 2010
Dr Steve Stewart-Williams just published his first book. It’s called Darwin, God and
the Meaning of Life, and it’s about the implications of evolutionary theory and
evolutionary psychology for the central topics in philosophy – the existence of God,
the place of mind in nature, the place of human beings among the animals, the
meaning of life, etc. The publisher is Cambridge University Press.
Dr Emmanuel Pothos has been awarded the title of Reader. This is a very well
deserved promotion. Congratulations, Emmanuel.
July 2010
Well done to Neil Carter, who recently hosted the annual ATSiP (Association of
Technical Staff in Psychology) conference, here at Swansea University. The ATSiP
group exists primarily to share knowledge between technicians working in
Psychology and Psychology related departments in academic institutions and holds
a single annual conference. This year, Neil won the inaugural Keith Nicholson Prize
for Best Presentation, for his talk on high performance computing, based on the
analysis of large data sets generated by the department's EEG systems.
Prof. Andy Parrott has co-organised two symposia at the 27th International
Congress of Applied Psychology, being held this year in Melbourne Australia. The
other co-organisers are Professor Andrew Scholey (Swinburne University, Australia),
and Dr Philip Murphy (Edge Hill University, UK). The papers from these two
symposia will be published a special issue of the journal - Human
Psychopharmacology.
June 2010
Prof. Rodger Wood will be giving the keynote lecture at the Danish
Neuropsychological Society and the Danish Child Neuropsychological Society held
by the Center for Rehabilitation of Brain Injury at the University of Copenhagen,
June 11th. The talk will be – “Disorders of inhibitory control after brain injury:
pharmacological and psychological management of aggression".
April 2010
Congratulations to three of our Final Year students who have won prizes at the 39th
Welsh Branch Annual Student Conference.
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Sarah Harris won second prize for her talk - ‘Lifestyle behaviour and
cognition: exercise-related self-schemas, memory and the Theory of Planned
Behaviour’
Catherine Steenfeldt-Kristen won first prize for her poster - ‘Choice blindness
with haptically-presented objects’
Mark Garvey won second prize for his poster - ‘Explicit priming of biological
motion’
We are delighted to welcome Prof. Paul Bennett to the Department of Psychology.
Prof. Bennett obtained his PhD from the University of Birmingham and has
previously worked as a clinical psychologist and academic in NHS settings and the
universities of Birmingham, Bristol, and Cardiff. His research interests include the
study of how people cope with the threat of illness or genetic conditions and
developing brief psychological interventions to help people cope with these
challenges.
Prof. Andy Parrott, and Professor Johannes Thome (Medical School Swansea
University), co-organised a symposium at the recent 18th European Congress of
Psychiatry, March 2010. The conference was held at the International Conference
Centre, Munich, Germany. Their symposium was entitled: ‘Psychiatric aspects of
recreational drug use: patterns of association and potential explanatory models.
March 2010
We are delighted to welcome Dr Christoph Weidemann to the Department of
Psychology. Dr. Weidemann obtained his first academic degree from the University
of Bonn (Germany) and then joined Richard Shiffrin's research group at Indiana
University, Bloomington (USA) where he obtained a PhD in Psychology and
Cognitive Science. After several years of post-doctoral work in Michael Kahana's
research group at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), he joined our department
where he will combine methods from mathematical psychology and cognitive
neuroscience to investigate cognitive processes.
February 2010
Prof. Andy Parrott was Guest Editor for the latest ‘MDMA/Ecstasy’ issue of
Neuropsychobiology. The combined 3rd and 4th issues of volume 60
Neuropsychobiology are entitled ‘The Psychobiology of MDMA’. This is based on
the International MDMA conference held at Swinburne University in Melbourne,
Australia. This conference was organised by Andy, during his three-month
sabbatical at the Brain Science Institute in Swinburne University, last year.
January 2010
Lisa Osborne, Dr Louise McHugh, and Prof. Phil Reed, along with Gareth Noble
(who led the application), Angela Fawcett, Emma Hughes, Tamara Brooks, Rachel
Church, and Sally Williams have been successful in their application for the
establishment of a Children and Young People's Research Network, Autism
Research Development Group, and have been awarded a grant (£1000) to facilitate
the development of research proposals in this field.
In recent months, Prof. Andy Parrott has been in the national news, where he was
asked to comment on the dismissal of David Nutt as Head of the Advisory
Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). He appeared on the BBC1 Breakfast
Television programme, the Radio 4 Today programme, the BBC2 Newsnight
programme, and was quoted in various national newspaper articles. He noted that
Professor Nutt had consistently understated the damaging effects of Ecstasy/MDMA
and cannabis on human well-being. He also recommended to the Home Secretary
and the ACMD that these recreational drugs should not be downgraded.
December 2009
Prof. Rodger Wood, Nicholas Alderman, and Claire Williams are the 2008 second
place winners of the Henry Stonnington Award for review articles in Brain Injury. The
title of their paper is "Assessment of neurobehavioral disability: a review of existing
measures and recommendations for a comprehensive assessment tool".
October 2009
Prof. Phil Reed’s book on behavioural theories and interventions for autism has
recently been published. Full reference: Reed, P. (2009). Behavioral theories and
interventions for autism. New York: Nova Science Publishers. This new text is an
essential handbook of contemporary behavioural practice for Autism. For more
details,
see: https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=9564
Prof. Andy Parrott was the invited keynote speaker for the Annual Conference of the
British Psychological Society Psychobiology Section. The Conference was held at the
Low Wood Hotel, Ambleside, in September 2009.
Dr Louise McHugh and Lisa Osborne secured a WORD studentship for a PhD
project on Development of a novel mode of service-delivery (PH-ACT) to promote
autonomy in socially-isolated older people value: £59729.
July 2009
Dr Gavin Perry (Swansea) and Dominic Dwyer (Cardiff) were allocated £460 from
WICN to study whether perceptual learning of faces and objects is position specific.
Prof. Paul Willner, with colleagues in Cardiff, Birmingham and Glasgow, has been
awareded £988K from the NIHR Health Technology Assessment programme to
conduct a randomized controlled trial of a manualized group-based CBT
intervention for anger in people with mild to moderate learning disabilities.
April 2009
Dr Simon Dymond has been awarded £33,574.00 from the BIAL Foundation to
investigate the ERP correlates of relational learning.
March 2009
Dr Katy Tapper and Dr Emmanuel Pothos obtained a research grant from
the Nuffield Foundation Grant: Thinking about food: effects on food-related
attentional bias. £7,366. March 2009 - February 2010).
Prof. Rodger Wood will be giving a keynote lecture in Washington in March 2009
on Neurobehavioural Rehabilitation - International Conference on Culture, Ethnicity,
and Brain Injury Rehabilitation.
February 2009
ESRC funding: Tapper K., Maio, G., Haddock, G., Lewis, M. Lifestyle Change: Values
and Volition. Economic and Social Research Council. £425,000. September 2009 –
August 2012.
January 2009
Prof. John Manning (recently appointed Hon Professor in the deparment) has a new
book out: Manning, J. (2009). The Finger Ratio. Faber & Faber.
Prof. Toby Lloyd-Jones has been successful in obtaining ESRC funding, in
collaboration with the University of Aberdeen and the University of Teeside for a
joint UK/Japan study on 'Recalling and Recognizing Faces of Other-races: A
Behavioural and Eye Movement Study'; value: £79,311.51.
Prof. Toby Lloyd-Jones has been appointed Editorial Board Member for The Open
Applied Linguistics Journal.
December 2008
Dymond S., Lawrence, N., Hinton, E., Cox, W. M., Yuen, K., Ihssen, N., Hoon, A. E., &
Dixon, M. D. Neural correlates of problem gambling: A combined MEG and fMRI
investigation. Wales Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience - Program Grant Scheme
(WBCS047; £37,342.50).
September 2008
Dr Phil Tucker & Emeritus Prof. Simon Folkard, together with Dr. Jean_Claude
Marquie (University of Toulouse II) & Dr. David Ansiau (University of Monaco) have
been awarded £50,700 by the Institute of Occupational Safety & Health (IOSH) to
examine the long-term effects of shiftwork in relation to ageing and health. The
research is based on longitudinal data obtained from medical examinations and
questionnaires, collected from a large sample of shiftworkers over a period of 10
years (1996 - 2006). It aims to examine the long term effects of shiftworking on
outcomes such as sleep, cognition, metabolic dysfunction and quality of life.
July 2008
Prof. Andy Parrott will be organizing an international conference on ‘The
Psychobiology of Ecstasy/MDMA’ at Swinburne University, on Sept 11th- 12th 2008.
The conference papers will be published as a special MDMA issue of the journal
Neuropsychobiology. He will also be organising a half day Ecstasy/MDMA
symposium at the Annual Conference of the Australian Psychological Society, which
is being held in Hobart Tasmania. This half-day symposium will be held on Sept
26th.
June 2008
Dr Phil Tucker has been elected to the editorial board of the Scandinavian Journal
of Work, Environment & Health.
May 2008
Prof. Andy Parrott was recently the ‘expert witness’ for a National Geographic film
about recreational Ecstasy/MDMA users. The filming was undertaken at two night
clubs in Amsterdam, where recreational users were interviewed about their
experiences when on the dance drug MDMA. Three paramedics were also present
to monitor heart rate, blood pressure and general well-being. We also interviewed
the Ecstasy/MDMA users the following day in order to cover their more negative
feelings during the recovery period. The film is part of the National Geographic
Magazine series ‘Taboo’ – about unusual life styles. The following week the
production crew (Australian, British & American) were flying to the Faroe Islands for
another film – this time about ‘native whale hunters’…although they really wanted to
stay in Amsterdam.
Prof. Rodger Wood has been elected to the board of the journal Brain Injury. He has
also been invited to give a 2 day workshop in Toronto on head trauma and
neurobehavioural disability by the Canadian Brain Injury Association.
April 2008
Lisa Osborne and Prof. Phil Reed have been awarded a grant from the Disabilities
Trust to study: School factors promoting social and emotional functioning of young
people with Autistic Spectrum Conditions. Value: £20,000, duration: 12 months.