Research

Our 33 members of academic staff consistently produce and publish high impact research spanning all subdisciplines of psychology. The Department of Psychology provides a world-class research environment for postgraduate students in Biological, Cognitive, Social or Developmental Psychology along with more applied aspects such as Educational Psychology, Forensic/Criminological Psychology, Neuroscience (including Neurorehabilitation) and Health Psychology. Much of our research is interdisciplinary both within the department and outside of the department.

The last Research Assessment Exercise (RAE2008) rated 95% of our output as being of International Quality with 60% of our output being World Leading (3* and 4*). This puts the Durham University Psychology Department in the top 6 departments in the country. The Department has active research grants with the ESRC, MRC, BBSRC, NIHR as well as charities such as The Stroke Association and the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research. The research activities in the Department fall within five research groupings:

• Applied, Clinical and Health Psychology
• Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Developmental Psychology
• Social, Emotional and Evolutionary Psychology
• Neuroscience of Learning and Memory

In addition, members of the Department play leading roles in the following research institutes, centres and units:

• Biophysical Sciences Institute
• Centre for the Coevolution of Biology and Culture
• Centre for Vision & Visual Cognition
• Centre for Developmental Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit
• Durham University Neuroimaging Centre
• North East Consortium for Developmental Research and Training
• Wolfson Research Institute
• Durham University Baby Lab

Recent Publications from the Department of Psychology

• Lew, A. R., Usherwood, B., Fragkioudaki, F., Koukoumi, V., Smith, S. P., Austen, J. M. & McGregor, A. (2014). Transfer of spatial search between environments in human adults and young children (Homo sapiens) implications for representation of local geometry by spatial systems. Developmental psychobiology 56(3): 421-434.
• Levita, Liat, Bois, Catherine, Healey, Andrew Smyllie, Emily Papakonstantinou, Evelina, Hartley Tom, & Lever Colin (2014). The Behavioural Inhibition System, anxiety and hippocampal volume in a non-clinical population. Biology of Mood and Anxiety Disorders 4: 4.
• Covey, J (2014). The role of dispositional factors in moderating message framing effects. Health Psychology 33(1): 52-65
• Thaler, Lore, Milne,Jennifer Arnott,Stephen Kish,Daniel & Goodale, Melvyn (2014). Neural Correlates of Motion Processing through Echolocation, Source Hearing and Vision in Blind Echolocation Experts and Sighted Echolocation Novices. Journal of Neurophysiology 111(1): 112-127.
• Lind, S. E., Williams, D. M., Bowler, D. M. & Peel, A. (2014). Episodic memory and episodic future thinking impairments in high-functioning autism spectrum disorder: An underlying difficulty with scene construction or self-projection?. Neuropsychology 28(1): 55-67.
• Zhang, Q. & Covey, J. (2014). Past and future implications of near-misses and their emotional consequences. Experimental Psychology 61(2): 118-126.