BSc Projects - Potential Supervisors 2023-24

Resilience within university study - This study will consider how undergraduate students draw upon sources of resilience during difficult and challenging times within their studies. By utilising a selection of resilience questionnaire measures, the study will investigate the various ways in which students 'bounce back' from periods of stress and uncertainty and the tools they draw upon which help them to do this.

The impact of positive psychology - This study will investigate the impact of a small-scale positive psychology intervention on the mindsets and emotional wellbeing of university students. It will explore the implementation and influence of a selection of positive psychology exercises designed to help facilitate a more optimistic outlook and to alleviate symptoms of stress and anxiety.

The nature of motivation within undergraduate students - This study will explore the nature of students' motivation within their university studies. It will draw upon various motivation theories and utilise questionnaire measures which assess what sustains student engagement in their work and which types of motivation are most effective and enduring.

1. Forgetting - although forgetting is often thought of as a unitary process, the way we forget might instead depend on the type of information we are required to remember. This project will measure forgetting to reveal how forgetting differs across stimulus types.

2. Integration - we are often able to intergrate related information, but the mechanisms that support this process are not well understood. This project will reveal the boundary conditions for integration - when and why it occurs.

I have a working relationship with a local Doggy Daycare where a small group of students can go to collect data for their projects. This will be a group project and students will need to be confident around dogs of all breeds and sizes. Places for this project are limited so please get in touch with me in advance to discuss your interest. 
I am also happy to discuss your own ideas and develop a study that addresses a mutual interest. I can be flexible in supervising a blend of group and individual projects. If you have an idea you wish to explore, come and chat with me about it! 

Please get in touch if you are interested in this type of project

alex.benjamin@york.ac.uk

alex.pike@york.ac.uk 

I am interested in various forms of memory consolidation that result from sleep. This includes lexical integration, memory transformation, false memory creation and emotional memory consolidation.

More recently I have become interested in developing educational interventions that reduce the impact and influence of ‘fake news’.

I am happy to supervise behavioural experiments that disentangle the influences of sleep and time on memory consolidation. This could broadly relate to a number of areas within this remit, such as emotional or lexical memory consolidation, or a related project of your own devising (the literature is vast and varied!). Unlike other sleep researchers in this list our experiments would likely take place over one or two days outside the sleep lab (i.e. will be home-based rather than lab-based), and would not involve EEG. 

I am also interested in developing educational interventions to help people distinguish from ‘real’ and ‘fake’ news. This is a new and prescient interest I would like to explore further with a student.

alex.reid@york.ac.uk

Our ability to use language is what makes us uniquely human, but we still don't fully understand how human language is learned or processed.  For example, children seem to acquire their first language with ease, and yet as adults we find learning a new language much more difficult.

One way to explore the question of how language is learnt and processed, is to teach people made up words (e.g., mof = dog, mofeem = dogs; larch = table; larcheem = tables), and see how well they learn them. By doing this we can explore what types of cognitive mechanisms underpin the learning. For instance, how much of language learning relies on implicit learning or explicit learning? Is this the same across different contexts? Is one type of learning better than the other and could we then exploit this when we learn a language? We can also test whether different training methods have an impact on initial learning, as well as long-term maintenance of the acquired knowledge.  

I am also happy to talk about project ideas related to reading and the psychology of education. 

My main research interests are: bilingualism, language switching, language production, executive control, cognitive ageing.

I am interested in supervising projects on topics related to bilingualism (for example, how do bilinguals switch languages and choose which language to use?) or cognitive ageing (for example, how do older and younger adults differ in the way they use language?).

Some possible project ideas are:

1. Do bilinguals adjust their own language choice to the person they are talking with? For example, if someone strongly prefers Language B over Language A, will a bilingual start using Language B more? And if that is the case, is this the consequence of a more automatic mechanism (for example, priming) or do we change our behaviour more strategically to help the other person or to be viewed more positively by them?

2. When there are multiple word options (for example, sofa or couch), speakers will more often use the word that the person they are talking with just used (e.g., sofa). Does this lexical alignment differ between younger and older adults?

3. Bilinguals might switch languages for a variety of reasons. One reason could be to cue the listener (or reader) about the type of information that is coming up, for example an unexpected word. Does language switching influence how bilinguals predict upcoming words?

These behavioural studies can be run online or in the lab and can be completed individually or in groups. I would also be very happy to discuss project ideas from students.

angela.debruin@york.ac.uk

I study the origins of human social behavior, with a focus on how prosocial behavior is shaped by our psychology for acquiring culture and following social norms.

I am interested in supervising projects (particularly group projects) that explore how social norms, culture and psychology interact. Some examples of possible questions:
- Do social norms influence people's prosocial behaviour (i.e. generosity in charitable donations)?
- Do cultural beliefs (e.g. individualism/collectivism) influence how willing people are to conform in classic psychological measures (e.g. Asch's measure of conformity)?
- Does individualism/collectivism influence how willing people are to conform to social norms (e.g. for pro-environmental behaviour, for charitable donations)?

bailey.house@york.ac.uk

This year, I would like to investigate the factors that lead us to mind-wander when we are reading. Normally, there is more wind-wandering in easy/automated tasks. Research suggests the opposite relationship with task difficulty during reading: we mind-wander more when texts are hard to understand. I would like to investigate the hypothesis that this is because comprehension utilises the semantic system and this blocks mind-wandering. When comprehension breaks down, semantic representations are then freed up to support thoughts that are irrelevant to the text.

beth.jefferies@york.ac.uk 

I am interested in supervising topics that use technology (e.g., video games, virtual reality) to study emotion and/or social interaction. 

cade.mccall@york.ac.uk

I am happy to supervise quantitative and qualitative projects related to any of my the topics mentioned, or that combine any and all of them! For example, relationships between social media and mental health, attitudes to offenders with mental health conditions, self-disclosure on social media, ect. I am also happy to discuss your own ideas and develop a research project that relates to both our interests. 

1. The relationship between depersonalisation, derealisation and intrusive thoughts in individuals prone to hallucination-like experiences
2. The impact of psychotic-like self-disturbances on paranoid thinking in nonclinical individuals
3. The extent to which psychological resilience may protect nonclinical individuals against psychotic-like experiences

Please note that I am more than happy to take a flexible approach and accommodate students' own interests. Please email me directly if you wish to discuss further.

I am interested in language and literacy development, both typical and atypical. I am also interested in neurodiversity more broadly, and how different neurodevelopmental disorders may overlap.

This year, I am particularly keen to offer projects which examine factors that may make it easier to learn new words and structures in language: for example, production, spaced learning, or interfering with conscious strategies to promote implicit learning.

The ultimate goal of my research is to help children learn. I am interested in questions such as: How does learning and memory change across development? How do these processes support language acquisition, and in turn contribute to the literacy skills that enable us to succeed in education? What are the consequences of learning difficulties on later wellbeing?

This year, I am particularly keen to supervise projects that address the following questions:

1)      Does sleep support vocabulary acquisition from reading? We know that sleep plays an important role in consolidating new words into long-term vocabulary knowledge, but few studies have examined these processes following incidental learning.

2)      How do we acquire vocabulary across contexts? It is difficult for individuals to learn new words that they encounter in varied contexts, but memory processes during sleep may help to overcome this initial challenge.

3)      What is the role of associative inference in word learning? Children and adults are able to make inferences across overlapping pairs of stimuli, such as faces and objects. We will develop a new paradigm to study related processes during word learning.

These projects are most readily conducted with adult participants, but questions can be shaped around development and educational relevance. I am also happy to supervise research projects on development and disorders that use existing datasets, which are best suited to students interested in developing advanced quantitative skills. 

Adult psycholinguistics, speech perception, word recognition, the mental lexicon, sleep and memory consolidation.

Although I’m happy to supervise projects in all the areas listed, this year I would be particularly keen to conduct group projects looking at:

1) Does sleep help us consolidate our social relations?
2) How do we track who said what? Linking conversations to identities of unfamiliar faces
3) When predictions go wrong. Linking memory performance to language comprehension.

gareth.gaskell@york.ac.uk

I am more than happy to offer a project that relates to issues broadly relevant to mental health. Titles of recent projects I've supervised include: 

• #Bodypositive: ‘Body positivity promoting’ imagery on Instagram and its effects on young women

• The Influence of Gender and Obsessive-compulsive Thoughts upon the Development of Exercise Fixations 

• Personality Traits and their Influence on Exercise Addiction and Appearance Management

• Internal vs. External Jogging: Comparing Exercise and Humour for Improving Affect

• Eating behaviour and Somatic Awareness: Is Self-Compassion a factor in both men and women?

• The effects of Familiarity and Information on Attitudes towards Mental and Physical Disorders.

• Generalisation of Attentional Focus on Food Intake to Related Activities
• An Investigation Into The Effects Of Cognitive Challenge On Snack Food Preference.
• Getting the timing right: effects of the scent of lavender on psychological state
• Weight consciousness as a function of personality
• Think Positive: Is Attributional Style a Predictor of Psychological Well-Being
• The effect of music mood and tempo on stress
• Why do we Donate? Examining the Influence of Personality and Marketing on Charitable Giving.

• Personality and Eating Attitudes: How Does Conscientiousness and Controlling Behaviour Link with Damaging Eating Behaviours?

• The effects of Familiarity and Information on Attitudes towards Mental and Physical Disorders.

• An Investigation into the Relationship Between Personality Traits, Exercise Addiction and Appearance Concern

gavin.phillips@york.ac.uk

I am interested in several areas related to:

1) wellbeing including wellbeing and religion; student general wellbeing; help-seeking behaviour in undergraduates; and wellbeing across genders

2) public opinions of forensic psychology issues spanning all aspects of the Criminal Justice System, and the various individuals that play a role in this system (e.g. offenders, victims, police and prison officers)

Wellbeing and religion: In this area, I am particularly intrigued by how conceptualisations of God influence wellbeing. These can include the complexity of how one views God; the images used to represent God; and the degrees of attachment to God. However, I will also be interested in exploring how being religious or having some form of religious commitment influences wellbeing.

Student general wellbeing: In this area, I have a particular focus on the thinking patterns that students utilize that help them to adapt to the university experience and/or develop higher levels of resilience. Other predictors of wellbeing outside of thinking patterns are also welcomed.

Help-seeking behaviour in undergraduates: In this area, I would be interested in exploring how students seek help, comparing the impact on wellbeing of, for instance, formal help-seeking to other forms of help-seeking (such as social support). Please feel free to consider non-traditional conceptualizations of help-seeking such as prayer.

Wellbeing across genders: In this area, I am eager to explore how wellbeing differs not only between males and females but also across different orientations and genders.

Public opinions concerning forensic psychology issues: In this area, I am happy to supervise projects exploring the role of gender and race on judgements of offender guilt; levels of agreement for changes in the current laws; and evaluations of the efficacy of current rehabilitative programmes. However, there are a range of other issues that can be explored, so please get in touch to discuss your particular interests. 

karisha.k.george@york.ac.uk 

karla.evans@york.ac.uk

Dog Dictionary: This project would aim to collect high quality audio recordings of dog vocalisations in a range of contexts, so we can look for acoustic variation in vocalisations given in different contexts, which may contribute towards efforts to build a 'dog dictionary' for their vocalisations. Depending on how many people want to work together on this project we could then examine the accuracy of humans in detecting valence, arousal and context from the vocalisations. For this project you need to know plenty of people (friends / family) with dogs who you would need to feel confident to visit those dogs in their homes and make the recordings. I will supply recording equipment and can lend the equipment over the summer if you have a larger dog network at home than in York. 

Cross cultural  infant development: This project would involve coding and analysing data from our existing longitudinal data set collected in UK and rural Uganda, which offers an exciting insight into differences in the early social environment of infants in these two cultural contexts. This project would be focussed on understanding the importance and predictive power of early engagement in joint attention (infant and caregiver jointly attending to an interesting event) for later cognition. We have data from various behavioural experiments to examine joint attention in infants when they were 10-21 months old. You would code the video data for joint attention events and skills and then test whether joint attention performance predicts other aspects of cognition that we measured in infancy or early childhood (e.g. Language development, cooperation, social norm understanding – you would have the choice of what to focus on here). You will be trained on the use of Observer video coding software and work with other group members to device a coding scheme before implementing it.

I would be happy to supervise projects related to my general interests. Some project ideas:

1. People who successfully integrate their multiple social identities within their self-image have better mental health outcomes. Identity integration also buffers the negative impact of perceived discrimination on mental health. In this project, students would develop an intervention to increase social identity integration.
2. Some evidence suggests that people show more hostility towards outgroups on morality-related dimensions of social categorization (e.g., politics, religion) than non-morality-related dimensions (e.g., age, education). Students would conduct online behavioural experiments to test whether morality-based outgroups elicit more aggression than non-morality-based outgroups and whether this response depends on the level of perceived threat from the outgroup.
3. Some social categories are more informative of the person’s beliefs (e.g., religion), while others are more informative of the person’s competence and status (e.g., job). Belief-indicative groups elicit stronger ingroup bias and status-indicative groups elicit stronger preference for higher status. Students could propose either original studies or secondary data analysis projects to further explore this distinction.

Students who want to propose their own project idea are very welcome.

I am happy to supervise projects across various forms of communication/discourse analysis, using qualitative or mixed methods. My principal interests are political debates (including Prime Minister's Questions), broadcast interviews, and political speeches. I can also supervise projects focused on nonverbal communication.

Please get in touch to discuss specific research proposals, or I can advise on study options once I know your areas of interest. Projects might have a topical focus, for example, the Covid-19 pandemic or the effects of Brexit.

Recent projects include: An analysis of equivocation and personal attacks in Prime Minister's Questions; A gender-based study of political interviewer toughness; Speaker-audience interaction in the speeches of Greta Thunberg; Equivocation by Premier League football managers; An analysis of prejudice within Black Lives Matter discourse; Detecting deception in appeals for a missing person.

Projects this year include (but are not limited to) addressing the following questions:

1. What is the most important social information we derive from observing other peoples' actions? We will use 'Motion Capture' information to animate computer avatars to use as stimuli during experiments that can be conducted either in the Laboratory or via Online platforms.
2. How do Autistic traits impact social perception? We will determine how people with high and low degrees of autistic traits perceive human actions, and examine how autistic traits can enhance perceptual judgements. This research can be performed in the Laboratory or Online.

I am interested in two general areas, the psychology of learning in Higher Education and also in the psychology of religious belief.

Psychology of learning in Higher Education: I am interested in the application of concepts from Education Psychology to learning in higher education. This includes looking at the ways in which motivational and emotional states influence learning at university. I will consider most projects in this general area but topics I am current interested in are

1) What factors lead to students have difficulties with academic writing

2) What predicts academic self-handicapping

Psychology of Religion: I am also interested is various aspects of the psychology of religion. In the past I have supervised projects on the impact of religion on quality of life and the way in which people process religious information. I will consider most projects in this general area

paul.bishop@york.ac.uk

philip.quinlan@york.ac.uk

I am interested in projects that look at

1. Factors that increase or decrease the chance of hearing or seeing things others do not.  So, in this area we would look at factors like self reported sleep, how often people dissociate or space out, people’s self reported imagery ability, whether they are on edge and feeling anxious, and also how intrusive memories and images may increase the chance of having unusual experiences.  These could be done by using questionnaires or using some experimental tasks we have developed.
2. Factors that lead people to feel suspicious and wary of others, and in particular how people make social judgements about others trustworthiness.  Projects could be done in a number of ways and look at how people evaluate the trustworthiness of others perhaps based on their face, or movement, or some other factors
3. An area that is not well explored is hallucinatory experiences in other sensory modalities, so feeling, tasting, smelling things others do not, and we can look at how common these are, and that may lead to them.  

Anthropogenic risk. Many of the most pressing problems facing humanity are human in origin. I am interested in aspects of decision making and behaviour that expose humanity to these risks, especially extinction risks posed by nuclear weapons, synthetic biology, and misaligned AI.

Mind perception. Ethical consideration of others (humans, robots, rocks) often depends on whether or not we view them as conscious. My research examines cues that inform attribution of consciousness to others in everyday life.

I am happy to supervise projects in these areas. I also encourage to students to develop their own project ideas.

I'm broadly interested in two areas:

1. Interaction between social psychology and technology
2. Teaching and learning in Higher Education

This year, I'm particularly interested in any projects on

1. Dark Triad and relationship dissolution online
2. Vulnerable and Grandiose Narcissism and motivations for online dating
3. Emophilia (tendency to fall in love fast and often) and online dating
4. Academic and social costs (e.g. belonging, social identity as a student, self-esteem) to students who need to work while studying

Alternatively, if you have any of your own ideas that fit within my areas of interest, please feel free to email me and we can have a chat about them.

sally.quinn@york.ac.uk

I'm happy to supervise projects in two broad areas: 

1) The role of sleep in learning and memory. 
2) Brain mechanisms linking sleep to mental health.

I'm particularly interested in understanding how memories are processed in the sleeping brain. I'm also keen to better understand how sleep supports our ability to regulate emotions and control unwanted thoughts. I'm open to group projects that could undertake larger bodies of work (e.g. collecting sleep EEG data in the sleep lab) or individual projects that use online data collection methods. 

In this project we will use data from an exiting longitudinal study on children’s mathematical development one the first few years of primary school.  The proposed project is on children’s performance on the so-called number line estimation task. In this task children are asked to put numbers (e.g. 23, 67..) on a number line going from left to right with 0 on the left and 100 on the right. In the project we will investigate the developmental change over time on this task and how it relates to mathematical development and other domain-general skills (e.g. language skills, executive functions, motivation and math anxiety).

I offer projects investigating the perception and memory of actions and movies and their relation to language. I am also interested in the relationship between speaking fluency and other cognitive functions.

Some example questions are:

1. How does language use affect event perception and memory?
2.  Does speech fluency relate to non-verbal inhibition skills?

These studies use learning and memory tests that can be internet-based.

silvia.gennari@york.ac.uk

There are two main areas I would like to focus on, with scope for students to introduce their own ideas under these broad headings:

1. The impact of having an atypical voice- how does having a stutter, audible tics, or a non-standard accent affect how people feel about their own voice and how others react to them? This could be qualitative, quantitative or a mixture of both; we have an audio recording database that can be used for standalone analysis or used as the basis for an online perceptual experiment.

2. Conversational interaction in typical speakers- we will work together to design and pilot an in-person experiment looking at how people co-ordinate when they speak together.  You would choose one aspect of speech behaviour to analyse (for example, you might look at whether talkers change their speaking or breathing rate to align more closely with each other) with the possibility of also looking at brain data using fNIRS depending on the availability of resources. 

sophie.meekings@york.ac.uk 

Possible topics this year:

• Effects of distraction (any kind!) on speech comprehension.
• Individual differences in understanding speech in noise. How come some of us are good at it while others struggle?
• Speech perception is noise is known to be more difficult for non-native speakers. Why?
• Voice and identity recognition.

sven.mattys@york.ac.uk

I have an interest in a variety of projects related to human-animal relations, prejudice, ideologies, and group relations. All my work is quantitative (i.e. experiments or surveys). I am open to discuss any projects from below.

Current topics:

• Ideologies: ideological thinking and cognitive biases i.e. how ideologies change how we think
• Human-animal relations: Such as the psychology of eating meat
• When good people do bad things: consumption of morally troublesome products (i.e. sweatshop clothing, mobile phones etc.)
• Intragroup prejudice: such as women having negative attitudes of other women
• Sexual objectification: seeing or treating people as sex-objects

thomas.davies@york.ac.uk 

I am developing new approaches to testing spatial memory as a way to diagnose and monitor early Alzheimer's Disease. This combines psychophysics and VR/3D "games" programming.

More generally, I am interested in the way different kinds of information are represented and processed in the brain, and especially in spatial cognition (e.g., how we find our way, how we know where we are, why do we get lost?), memory and the hippocampus. I use neuroimaging techniques together with experimental psychology and computational modelling to investigate these issues.

Your project might involve investigations of scene processing (i.e., how we recognize places based on vision) or aspects of memory. If you have programming experience it may be possible to do a project involving aspects of computational modelling or novel VR/3D-based tasks.