InPsych 5 - Jan/Feb 2016

ISSUE5

ISSUE5 The School of Psychology, Sport and Exercise

INPSYCH

Celebrate Staff Success 2015!

Staff from the School of Psychology, Sport and Exercise excelled at this year’s Staffordshire University Celebrating Staff Success Awards. This annual award ceremony held in the beautiful Kings Hall in Stoke-upon-Trent celebrates academic and support teams who have achieved success in the previous twelve months, attained teaching fellowships with the Higher Education Academy, and have excelled in their roles.

health conditions and also the work she has done developing a vibrant research culture within the Psychology Department, including initiatives such as setting up the Stoke Psychology in the Pub series of talks and Staffordshire University’s Images of Research competition.

> Professor Karen Rodham, Health Psychologist and Professor of Health Psychology, who was nominated in three categories, won the inaugural Excellence in Research Award. This recognised both her own high impact research into chronic

PSYCHOLOGY NEWS, STORIES AND EVENTS

WELCOME

> Academic Group leader and Health Psychologist Dr Emily Buckley beat stiff opposition to take the Inspirational Leadership Award for her work leading Postgraduate courses in Psychology.

Emily was presented her award by Vice Chancellor of Staffordshire University, Professor Michael Gunn.

In this January 2016 edition of InPsych we have lots of updates from the staff and students from Psychology Department at Staffordshire University.

Student Satisfaction on Staffordshire University’s MSc in Health Psychology!

MSc Health Psychology students at Staffordshire University are 100% satisfied with the quality of their course according to Post Graduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) 2015 results. The PTES is the only sectorwide survey to gain insight from taught postgraduate students about their learning and teaching experience.

Staffordshire University is the home of Health Psychology with our MSc being the first programme of its kind in the UK to be accredited by the British Psychological Society (BPS). Our students have access to top of the range facilities including a dedicated base-room within the £30 million pound Science Centre, a thriving psychology visiting speaker programme and journal club, as well as high-level teaching from academics who are active researchers in the area of Health Psychology.

teaching on the MSc including support, staff enthusiasm, and intellectual stimulation and 100% satisfied with their skill development feeling that the course helped to prepare them for future careers.

Our MSc continues to hold an excellent reputation nationally and is going from strength to strength. In the recent PTES poll all students surveyed indicated that they would recommend studying at Staffordshire University. In particular students were 100% satisfied with the quality of learning and

OPEN DAY DATES

Open Days are a great way to find out more about the courses you are interested in and to see what university life will be like.

Come and see us at one of our Undergraduate Open Days:

Saturday 13th February 2016 Saturday 19th March 2016 Saturday 23rd April 2016

We’ve recently hosted a very successful “Weird & Wonderful Psychology” community event in our £30 million pound Science Centre, which featured a range of fun activities and talks delivered by our students and staff on some of the fantastic and downright unusual aspects of Psychology (see Page 2 for details)!

Our Psychology students also took part in the University’s CareersFest event, which featured lots of networking, professional development and CV-enhancing workshops provided by a number of high profile external companies and organisations.

This was a great event that shows our commitment to ensuring that our students always have the edge when it comes to their employability!

Interested in Health Psychology?

Come along to one of our MSc Health Psychology Open Afternoons: Wednesday 3 February 2016

2-4pm

Wednesday 6 July 2016

2-4pm

Wednesday 17 August 2016

2-4pm

All Open Afternoons take place in the Science Centre, Leek Road, Stoke-on-Trent campus. Please book your place by emailing Dr Amy Burton (amy.burton@staffs.ac.uk).

Interested in Further Study?

We offer a range of postgraduate courses including Postgraduate Diplomas, MSc, Professional Doctorates and PhDs. For more information please visit: http://bit.ly/SUPsycourses

Judy David M8002

Follow @StaffsPsych For the latest news, exciting research updates and events taking place in the Psychology department at Staffordshire University

Hello! Welcome to the fifth edition of the InPsych Newsletter!

Academic Group Lead (Undergraduate Psychology)

In other news, one of our new lecturers, Dr Daniel Jolley was featured on BBC Radio Stoke talking about his research into Conspiracy Theories (see Page 3). Our Psychology team also received a number of prizes at Staffordshire University’s Celebrating Staff Success event, including awards for Best Research Impact (see page 3). Speaking of research, we have some interesting developments with Dr Sarah Dean recently publishing work into eyepatching therapy for children with “lazyeye” (known as amblyopia – see page 3). And we had not just one, but three, of our lecturing staff successfully completing their Stage 2 Health Psychologist Training – a very well done to Dr Amy Burton, Dr Gemma Hurst and Dr Heather Semper!

We have also appointed four very talented PhD students on our Faculty-funded Studentships who will be working on a range of exciting projects with staff in the Psychology department. We’re very pleased to welcome Irene, Sian, Emma, and Sonia to our team, who will be working on research projects into how people visualise their own chronic pain via drawings, how we can improve healthy eating behaviours in high schools, how we can better understand the role of negative emotion in producing false memories, and how we can develop more effective diabetes prevention interventions in partnership with Diabetes UK. We’re especially pleased to see Sian and Emma continue their studies with us after

Dr Emily Buckley Academic Group Lead (Psychology Postgraduate and Partnerships)

previously completing their Undergraduate Psychology degrees here at Staffordshire!

Welcome All! The Spring 2016 semester brings more exciting events, including our ongoing Psychology Research Speaker Series, our Open Evening for our Counselling Courses (10th February), the BPS West Midlands Psychology in the Pub Series hosted at the nearby Glebe Pub in Stoke, Open Days for prospective students, as well as our Annual Psychology Student Conference featuring research conducted by our students! Staffordshire University is also busy renovating our Stoke-on-Trent City Campus with a further £40 million investment, so we’re very excited to see these new developments which will further enhance our students’ experiences with even more state-of-the-art teaching rooms and learning spaces.

Please do keep in touch with the latest developments from the students and staff at the Psychology Department via our Twitter account (@StaffsPsych) and our blog (blogs. staffs.ac.uk/inpsych). Whether you’re a current or a prospective student, we hope to see you soon at one of our free Psychology talks, community events, Open Days or around our shiny Science Centre!

Dr Peter Jones Head of the School of Psychology, Sport and Exercise

INPSYCH

SCHOOL OF PSYCHOLOGY, SPORT AND EXERCISE

Weird and Wonderful Psychology Event

VOTING AND TALKS on Weird & Wonderful Psychology!

The Psychology department organised a successful community event, “Weird and Wonderful Psychology”, in December 2015. Dr Robert Dempsey and Dr Nichola Street report on a highly entertaining evening.

We even subjected the Head of the School of Psychology, Sport & Exercise, Dr Peter Jones, to our Human Lie Detector study – who was ably caught out by our Dr Gemma Hurst’s skills at detecting when he was lying!

Our event showcased some of the more unusual, fantastic and quite odd aspects of Psychology to an audience of visitors from the general public, students from local sixth form colleges, as well as staff and students from Staffordshire University. The event including a range of live demonstrations featuring the industry standard equipment used by staff and students in the Psychology department’s teaching and research activities.

In addition to demonstrations by our Psychology lecturers, the event also included a number of activities devised and performed by our Second Year Undergraduate Psychology students. Our students were tasked with designing and pitching their Weird & Wonderful demonstration as part of their Social Psychology seminars, with the winners demonstrating their activity live on the

These demonstrations included the use of facial ageing software to show visitors the potential effects of alcohol and smoking on facial appearance (as used in our health psychology research), using goggles to show the effects of macular degeneration and alcohol use on performance on simple dayto-day tasks, mindfulness-boosting activities, and whether we can use physiological measures of the stress response to detect when people are lying.

THE GREAT BRITISH PSYCHOLOGY BAKE-OFF! As part of the evening’s activities, a Psychology bake-off competition was held which featured assorted cakes and baked goods demonstrating various aspects of Psychology. These included Sigmund Freud Mince Pies, a Brain cake, the Big 5 Personality Traits, The Muller-Lyer Optical Illusion, gingerbread people representing Twin Studies and Gender Stereotyping, as well as a unique set of cakes demonstrating a positive correlation (and a statistical outlier!).

night including delivering a short talk in front of our invited guests.

Needless to say, our students did a fantastic job of performing their demonstrations on the night, including explaining how their activity demonstrates psychological phenomena to our invited guests. Our students demonstrated particular personality traits make for better leaders, how we can conform to perceived norms and obey authority figures, the “Chameleon Effect” when we change our expressions to match those of other people during “selfies”, through film showing how we can’t always see things changing in front of our eye known as ‘Inattentional Blindness’, and the power of stereotyping other people based on their appearance.

The event culminated in the voting for the best student demonstration from the evening – with The Mindcontrollers group winning first place with their demonstration exploring the psychological effects of conformity and obedience. The evening also featured a series of short talks by lecturers from the department on their research interests, including Dr Daniel Jolley on “Climate Change is a Hoax! The Psychology of Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories”, Dr Andrew Edmonds on “Jesus in Toast – Why People See Faces in Unusual Places”, and Mel Hall on “Who You Gonna Call! Ghostbusters?

The Psychology of the Paranormal”. All talks were well received by the audience and showcased some of the interesting and exciting research happening in the department.

Mel even gave a live demonstration of her psychic abilities by asking the audience to guess which number she was thinking of, with the majority correctly and spookily guessing “7”! Although there was a slight twist – our staff and students kept repeating the number 7 during the earlier demonstrations, so we’re not completely sure whether Mel is really psychic despite her claims otherwise!

The evening was a fantastic and very enjoyable event, and we were very pleased to see our guests getting enthused about Psychology and very proud of our students who presented their demonstrations in an engaging and professional manner.

Dr Daniel Jolley featured on BBC Radio Stoke discussing conspiracy theories!

Dr Daniel Jolley, one of our Lecturers in Psychology, was featured on BBC Radio Stoke’s Tim Wedgewood Evening show on Tuesday 1st December discussing his research into conspiracy theories ahead of the Psychology department’s Weird & Wonderful Psychology Event.

Daniel discussed some of the reasons why some people believe in conspiracy theories despite evidence to the contrary (e.g. that climate change is a hoax, Diana the Princess of Wales being assassinated by the Government), what effects these conspiracy theories can have on behaviours (e.g. not seeking vaccinations) and what we can do to change people’s conspiracy-related beliefs.

You can find out more about Daniel’s research by following his twitter account (@DrDanielJolley) and his blogs about the psychology of conspiracy theories (conspiracypsychology.com).

Judy David, Academic Group Lead for Undergraduate Psychology at Staffordshire University, commented: “I was proud of how enthusiastically students and staff approached this event. So many people contributed, and it was great fun to be able to show off some of the more strange aspects of Psychology to both the public and our own students.

There were some very interesting and stimulating activities and talks. I’m already looking forward to next year!”

Dr Peter Jones, Head of the School of Psychology, Sport & Exercise, said: “I really love our Weird and Wonderful event. It’s great how it allows our students to showcase the importance of Psychology and how touches every part of our lives, plus it also involves the wider public as Staffordshire University is such an important part of our community”.

Dr Sarah Dean: Reviewing Eye-Patching Treatment for Children with Amblyopia Dr Sarah Dean, Senior Lecturer in Psychology and a member of Staffordshire University’s Centre for Health Psychology, summarises the findings from her review of research on patching treatment for children with amblyopia which has recently been published by the British Journal of Ophthalmology: Amblyopia or ‘lazy eye’ is a condition that affects a lot of children.

Children with amblyopia have poor vision in one eye and without treatment this vision does not develop, meaning they have an increased risk of blindness. Treatment for amblyopia often involves the child being prescribed to wear a patch over their ‘good’ eye for part of the day. This forces the child to use their ‘lazy eye’ which allows the vision to develop. Although this treatment has been found to work really well when used with children under 7 years old, a lot of people find it difficult to adhere to their prescribed treatment. I am now exploring strategies to encourage children to complete the treatment.

INPSYCH

SCHOOL OF PSYCHOLOGY, SPORT AND EXERCISE

Weird and Wonderful Psychology Event

VOTING AND TALKS on Weird & Wonderful Psychology!

The Psychology department organised a successful community event, “Weird and Wonderful Psychology”, in December 2015. Dr Robert Dempsey and Dr Nichola Street report on a highly entertaining evening.

We even subjected the Head of the School of Psychology, Sport & Exercise, Dr Peter Jones, to our Human Lie Detector study – who was ably caught out by our Dr Gemma Hurst’s skills at detecting when he was lying!

Our event showcased some of the more unusual, fantastic and quite odd aspects of Psychology to an audience of visitors from the general public, students from local sixth form colleges, as well as staff and students from Staffordshire University. The event including a range of live demonstrations featuring the industry standard equipment used by staff and students in the Psychology department’s teaching and research activities.

In addition to demonstrations by our Psychology lecturers, the event also included a number of activities devised and performed by our Second Year Undergraduate Psychology students. Our students were tasked with designing and pitching their Weird & Wonderful demonstration as part of their Social Psychology seminars, with the winners demonstrating their activity live on the

These demonstrations included the use of facial ageing software to show visitors the potential effects of alcohol and smoking on facial appearance (as used in our health psychology research), using goggles to show the effects of macular degeneration and alcohol use on performance on simple dayto-day tasks, mindfulness-boosting activities, and whether we can use physiological measures of the stress response to detect when people are lying.

THE GREAT BRITISH PSYCHOLOGY BAKE-OFF! As part of the evening’s activities, a Psychology bake-off competition was held which featured assorted cakes and baked goods demonstrating various aspects of Psychology. These included Sigmund Freud Mince Pies, a Brain cake, the Big 5 Personality Traits, The Muller-Lyer Optical Illusion, gingerbread people representing Twin Studies and Gender Stereotyping, as well as a unique set of cakes demonstrating a positive correlation (and a statistical outlier!).

night including delivering a short talk in front of our invited guests.

Needless to say, our students did a fantastic job of performing their demonstrations on the night, including explaining how their activity demonstrates psychological phenomena to our invited guests. Our students demonstrated particular personality traits make for better leaders, how we can conform to perceived norms and obey authority figures, the “Chameleon Effect” when we change our expressions to match those of other people during “selfies”, through film showing how we can’t always see things changing in front of our eye known as ‘Inattentional Blindness’, and the power of stereotyping other people based on their appearance.

The event culminated in the voting for the best student demonstration from the evening – with The Mindcontrollers group winning first place with their demonstration exploring the psychological effects of conformity and obedience. The evening also featured a series of short talks by lecturers from the department on their research interests, including Dr Daniel Jolley on “Climate Change is a Hoax! The Psychology of Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories”, Dr Andrew Edmonds on “Jesus in Toast – Why People See Faces in Unusual Places”, and Mel Hall on “Who You Gonna Call! Ghostbusters?

The Psychology of the Paranormal”. All talks were well received by the audience and showcased some of the interesting and exciting research happening in the department.

Mel even gave a live demonstration of her psychic abilities by asking the audience to guess which number she was thinking of, with the majority correctly and spookily guessing “7”! Although there was a slight twist – our staff and students kept repeating the number 7 during the earlier demonstrations, so we’re not completely sure whether Mel is really psychic despite her claims otherwise!

The evening was a fantastic and very enjoyable event, and we were very pleased to see our guests getting enthused about Psychology and very proud of our students who presented their demonstrations in an engaging and professional manner.

Dr Daniel Jolley featured on BBC Radio Stoke discussing conspiracy theories!

Dr Daniel Jolley, one of our Lecturers in Psychology, was featured on BBC Radio Stoke’s Tim Wedgewood Evening show on Tuesday 1st December discussing his research into conspiracy theories ahead of the Psychology department’s Weird & Wonderful Psychology Event.

Daniel discussed some of the reasons why some people believe in conspiracy theories despite evidence to the contrary (e.g. that climate change is a hoax, Diana the Princess of Wales being assassinated by the Government), what effects these conspiracy theories can have on behaviours (e.g. not seeking vaccinations) and what we can do to change people’s conspiracy-related beliefs.

You can find out more about Daniel’s research by following his twitter account (@DrDanielJolley) and his blogs about the psychology of conspiracy theories (conspiracypsychology.com).

Judy David, Academic Group Lead for Undergraduate Psychology at Staffordshire University, commented: “I was proud of how enthusiastically students and staff approached this event. So many people contributed, and it was great fun to be able to show off some of the more strange aspects of Psychology to both the public and our own students.

There were some very interesting and stimulating activities and talks. I’m already looking forward to next year!”

Dr Peter Jones, Head of the School of Psychology, Sport & Exercise, said: “I really love our Weird and Wonderful event. It’s great how it allows our students to showcase the importance of Psychology and how touches every part of our lives, plus it also involves the wider public as Staffordshire University is such an important part of our community”.

Dr Sarah Dean: Reviewing Eye-Patching Treatment for Children with Amblyopia Dr Sarah Dean, Senior Lecturer in Psychology and a member of Staffordshire University’s Centre for Health Psychology, summarises the findings from her review of research on patching treatment for children with amblyopia which has recently been published by the British Journal of Ophthalmology: Amblyopia or ‘lazy eye’ is a condition that affects a lot of children.

Children with amblyopia have poor vision in one eye and without treatment this vision does not develop, meaning they have an increased risk of blindness. Treatment for amblyopia often involves the child being prescribed to wear a patch over their ‘good’ eye for part of the day. This forces the child to use their ‘lazy eye’ which allows the vision to develop. Although this treatment has been found to work really well when used with children under 7 years old, a lot of people find it difficult to adhere to their prescribed treatment. I am now exploring strategies to encourage children to complete the treatment.

ISSUE5

ISSUE5 The School of Psychology, Sport and Exercise

INPSYCH

Celebrate Staff Success 2015!

Staff from the School of Psychology, Sport and Exercise excelled at this year’s Staffordshire University Celebrating Staff Success Awards. This annual award ceremony held in the beautiful Kings Hall in Stoke-upon-Trent celebrates academic and support teams who have achieved success in the previous twelve months, attained teaching fellowships with the Higher Education Academy, and have excelled in their roles.

health conditions and also the work she has done developing a vibrant research culture within the Psychology Department, including initiatives such as setting up the Stoke Psychology in the Pub series of talks and Staffordshire University’s Images of Research competition.

> Professor Karen Rodham, Health Psychologist and Professor of Health Psychology, who was nominated in three categories, won the inaugural Excellence in Research Award. This recognised both her own high impact research into chronic

PSYCHOLOGY NEWS, STORIES AND EVENTS

WELCOME

> Academic Group leader and Health Psychologist Dr Emily Buckley beat stiff opposition to take the Inspirational Leadership Award for her work leading Postgraduate courses in Psychology.

Emily was presented her award by Vice Chancellor of Staffordshire University, Professor Michael Gunn.

In this January 2016 edition of InPsych we have lots of updates from the staff and students from Psychology Department at Staffordshire University.

Student Satisfaction on Staffordshire University’s MSc in Health Psychology!

MSc Health Psychology students at Staffordshire University are 100% satisfied with the quality of their course according to Post Graduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) 2015 results. The PTES is the only sectorwide survey to gain insight from taught postgraduate students about their learning and teaching experience.

Staffordshire University is the home of Health Psychology with our MSc being the first programme of its kind in the UK to be accredited by the British Psychological Society (BPS). Our students have access to top of the range facilities including a dedicated base-room within the £30 million pound Science Centre, a thriving psychology visiting speaker programme and journal club, as well as high-level teaching from academics who are active researchers in the area of Health Psychology.

teaching on the MSc including support, staff enthusiasm, and intellectual stimulation and 100% satisfied with their skill development feeling that the course helped to prepare them for future careers.

Our MSc continues to hold an excellent reputation nationally and is going from strength to strength. In the recent PTES poll all students surveyed indicated that they would recommend studying at Staffordshire University. In particular students were 100% satisfied with the quality of learning and

OPEN DAY DATES

Open Days are a great way to find out more about the courses you are interested in and to see what university life will be like.

Come and see us at one of our Undergraduate Open Days:

Saturday 13th February 2016 Saturday 19th March 2016 Saturday 23rd April 2016

We’ve recently hosted a very successful “Weird & Wonderful Psychology” community event in our £30 million pound Science Centre, which featured a range of fun activities and talks delivered by our students and staff on some of the fantastic and downright unusual aspects of Psychology (see Page 2 for details)!

Our Psychology students also took part in the University’s CareersFest event, which featured lots of networking, professional development and CV-enhancing workshops provided by a number of high profile external companies and organisations.

This was a great event that shows our commitment to ensuring that our students always have the edge when it comes to their employability!

Interested in Health Psychology?

Come along to one of our MSc Health Psychology Open Afternoons: Wednesday 3 February 2016

2-4pm

Wednesday 6 July 2016

2-4pm

Wednesday 17 August 2016

2-4pm

All Open Afternoons take place in the Science Centre, Leek Road, Stoke-on-Trent campus. Please book your place by emailing Dr Amy Burton (amy.burton@staffs.ac.uk).

Interested in Further Study?

We offer a range of postgraduate courses including Postgraduate Diplomas, MSc, Professional Doctorates and PhDs. For more information please visit: http://bit.ly/SUPsycourses

Judy David M8002

Follow @StaffsPsych For the latest news, exciting research updates and events taking place in the Psychology department at Staffordshire University

Hello! Welcome to the fifth edition of the InPsych Newsletter!

Academic Group Lead (Undergraduate Psychology)

In other news, one of our new lecturers, Dr Daniel Jolley was featured on BBC Radio Stoke talking about his research into Conspiracy Theories (see Page 3). Our Psychology team also received a number of prizes at Staffordshire University’s Celebrating Staff Success event, including awards for Best Research Impact (see page 3). Speaking of research, we have some interesting developments with Dr Sarah Dean recently publishing work into eyepatching therapy for children with “lazyeye” (known as amblyopia – see page 3). And we had not just one, but three, of our lecturing staff successfully completing their Stage 2 Health Psychologist Training – a very well done to Dr Amy Burton, Dr Gemma Hurst and Dr Heather Semper!

We have also appointed four very talented PhD students on our Faculty-funded Studentships who will be working on a range of exciting projects with staff in the Psychology department. We’re very pleased to welcome Irene, Sian, Emma, and Sonia to our team, who will be working on research projects into how people visualise their own chronic pain via drawings, how we can improve healthy eating behaviours in high schools, how we can better understand the role of negative emotion in producing false memories, and how we can develop more effective diabetes prevention interventions in partnership with Diabetes UK. We’re especially pleased to see Sian and Emma continue their studies with us after

Dr Emily Buckley Academic Group Lead (Psychology Postgraduate and Partnerships)

previously completing their Undergraduate Psychology degrees here at Staffordshire!

Welcome All! The Spring 2016 semester brings more exciting events, including our ongoing Psychology Research Speaker Series, our Open Evening for our Counselling Courses (10th February), the BPS West Midlands Psychology in the Pub Series hosted at the nearby Glebe Pub in Stoke, Open Days for prospective students, as well as our Annual Psychology Student Conference featuring research conducted by our students! Staffordshire University is also busy renovating our Stoke-on-Trent City Campus with a further £40 million investment, so we’re very excited to see these new developments which will further enhance our students’ experiences with even more state-of-the-art teaching rooms and learning spaces.

Please do keep in touch with the latest developments from the students and staff at the Psychology Department via our Twitter account (@StaffsPsych) and our blog (blogs. staffs.ac.uk/inpsych). Whether you’re a current or a prospective student, we hope to see you soon at one of our free Psychology talks, community events, Open Days or around our shiny Science Centre!

Dr Peter Jones Head of the School of Psychology, Sport and Exercise