Department of Psychology Newsletter

Research Grants

Professor Durant was awarded £177,266 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (US DoD) for the project iRealHAT-PEGA

News

Dr Danijela Serbic, the winner of the British Psychological Society’s DART-P’s (Division of Academics, Researchers and Teachers in Psychology) 2023 Higher Education Psychology Teacher of the Year Award, was interviewed by the Psychologist about her award. You can read Danijela’s interview here.

Congratulations to Dr. Beatrice Hayes and Dr. Adnan Levent, who have been awarded a University Teaching Prize for their student initiatives Wellbeing Day and Academia and Beyond.

Professor Hanna Zagefka conducted research in collaboration with GlobalGiving UK to study the link between climate change beliefs and giving to disaster relief. The research, including a survey with over 1,200 respondents, generated practical tips for the fundraising community and is covered here and here.

Dr Anna Crabtree attended the official launch of the Reading Well for Dementia scheme at the Houses of Parliament last week; Anna was the British Psychological Society representative on the book selection panel for the scheme. You can learn more about the scheme here.

Professor Amina Memon is one of the authors of a white paper published in April on research based recommendations on the conduct of forensic interviews of children in child abuse investigations.

Dr Juliet Holdstock delivered the presentation “Personal tutoring for large cohorts using linked lectures and individual meetings”, co-authored with Dr Sam Fairlamb, at the United Kingdom Advising and Tutoring association (UKAT) annual conference at the University of Greenwich, April 8th 2024.

Dr Joe Barnby has won £2500 from FENS and the Kavli Institute for a scientific exchange to work at The Jacobs Centre, University of Zurich for two weeks with Prof Nora Raschle to work on a project mapping the neural and computational development of adolescent social life.

Dr Adnan Levent has been selected to join the International BNA2025 Festival of Neuroscience programme organising committee.

Dr Joe Barnby was invited to give a seminar at the Department of Pharmacology at Oxford on our recent work modelling the influence of dopamine in social interaction.

Dr Gabriele Bellucci gave a presentation at the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association on moral heuristics

Professor Szonya Durant gave a talk at Workshop on Human and Computer Models of Video Understanding, Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Surrey on “The effects of depth of field on attention whilst exploring a virtual environment” with a contributor being a current MSci student Harsimran Kaur Suri.

Dr Irena Arslanova gave a Ted Talk in Berlin this February, titled “How your heartbeat shapes your experience of time”. You can watch the talk here.

Dr Joe Barnby’s symposium at CogSci (2024) on computational approaches to social maps in health and disorder with Prof Rebecca Saxe, Dr Julian Jara-Ettinger, Prof Marten Speekenbrink and Dr Ismail Guennouni was accepted.

Professor Anat Bardi took part in a European Commission meeting to decide on academic papers that will be produced from a new machine learning tool to identify personal values in newspapers, a tool that she has been contributing to. Attendees got a private tour of the European Parliament, and several papers are now planned from the joint work.

Pint of Science

In May, The Department of Psychology held it’s second Pint of Science event at The Red Lion pub in Egham. Pint of Science is a worldwide science festival which brings researchers to your local pub/cafe/space to share their scientific discoveries with the public. The event was held over three nights and saw talks across a range of topics from “ Are our brains Bayesian?” to “ Using Virtual Reality to prevent Burglary”. Thank you to all of our speakers: Dr Matteo Lisi, Isabelle Verhulst, Dr Adnan Levent, Dr Francesco Scaramozzino, Hannah Jones, Dr Kaili Rimfeld, Dr Beatrice Hayes, Dr Anna-Katharina Matke-Bauer, Dr Gabriele Bellucci, Dr Matt Talbot, Emine Belgen, and Dr Sahana Shankar. A big thank you to the organising committee,  Dr Carl Hodgetts, Natalie Starkey, Dr Irena Arslanova, Dr Matt Talbot, Kavishini Apasamy, Emine Bilgen, and Dr Aysha Bellamy. To learn more about Pint of Science, click here. 

Published Papers