BSc Projects - Potential Supervisors 2024-25

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.

Motivation/self-efficacy in undergraduate study - drawing on various questionnaire measures this study would explore which psychological factors may contribute to motivation and/or self-efficacy in undergraduate study. 

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

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

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.  

Within this project, I am interested in both typical and atypical language processing.

The role of community in the disabled student experience Projects:

I am currently undergoing projects considering the impact of community and a sense of belonging in the disabled student experience.  While provision for disabled students within Higher Education has increased, gaps in awarding, attrition, experience and job prospects still exist between disabled and non-disabled students.  It’s been argued that to fully bridge this gap, we need to build on the existing individual-based accessibility approach with a broader, community inclusive approach. As such I am interested in exploring the impact and role of community to explore and consider this argument as a way to potentially improve outcomes for disabled students within Higher Education.

Projects around disabilities, neurodiversity and developmental disorders

Given my above research interest I am also happy to consider other projects related to above.  

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

I am happy to supervise projects related to the following topics and/or to discuss project ideas students might have.

- Language switching. 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. A possible project could examine how language switching influences the way bilinguals predict upcoming words.

- Perception and processing of speech in familiar and unfamiliar accents. Potential projects could study how people process speech in accents they are more or less familiar with (for example, regional or non-native accents). Projects could also study how people perceive and evaluate such speech (for example, how trustworthy they think the speaker is).

These could work as individual or group projects and can be run online.

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

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 the topics mentioned, or that combine any and all of them! For example, relationships between social media and mental health, online interactions vs in-person ones, emotional self-disclosure on social media, online social norms, attitudes to mental health conditions and what impacts this (also in the context of offenders) ect. I am also happy to discuss your own ideas and develop a research project that relates to both our interests. 

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 group projects that address the following questions:

1)      How does sleep help us to learn words across contexts? We know that individuals find it harder to learn new words that they encounter across diverse contexts, but memory processes during sleep may help to overcome this initial challenge.

2)      How do we use prior knowledge to support new word learning? English is a morphologically rich language, for example the Latin root nov (meaning new) appears in novel, innovate, and novice. In this project, we will look at how people are helped or hindered by these relationships when they encounter new vocabulary.

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 large-scale 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 interested in three main areas related to:

1) how the university experience varies across students from intersectional backgrounds (e.g. comparing BAME and non-BAME students who also have a disability; identify as LGBTQ+; etc.) 

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

3) 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)

Intersectionality and the student experience: In this area, I am particularly interested in qualitative and quantitative research exploring how students who belong to multiple underrepresented backgrounds navigate university life. Please feel free to consider coping methods (e.g. cloaking; camouflaging; masking); as well as a variety of outcomes (e.g. lecture attendance; wellbeing)

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 utilise 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

Animal Behaviour/Cross-cultural infant development

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 (i) acoustic variation in vocalisations given in different behavioural contexts, as an indicator of what the vocalisations may mean to other dogs and humans (working towards a 'dog dictionary' and (ii) acoustic variation in the same vocalisation type given in positive and negative contexts which may show functional flexibility. 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. Given most people have larger dog networks at home rather than in York the timeline for this project is a little different to most other projects: you need to be available to complete Biology ethics (1 hour) and attend a half day training session on how to use the recording equipment and practice with my dog in W12-15, ideally after exams have all finished (depending on the timetable). You then need to have time available to collect the dog vocal data over the summer. 

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, as well as naturalistic mother-infant play interactions. 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 (individual or group) on the following topics, and to discuss related student ideas (e.g., on word or category learning):

(1) We somehow learn thousands of without needing a dictionary or teacher to tell us their definitions. For example, from hearing "I'd love a sweet, juicy mipp", we can get a sense of what a "mipp" is even though we've never encountered one. What information/processes do we use to pick up new words with seemingly little effort?

(2) ChatGPT and other language AIs have achieved remarkable success in mimicking human language fluency. Does the way this works in AI parallel the ways humans learn or process language?

(3) A lot of what we know about the world comes in the form of categories, like "dog", "cup" and "chair". How do we learn to group different things into categories, perhaps without even knowing that we're learning? Does learning to group things into categories influence the way we perceive them?

(4) Every experience is at least a little bit different from every other one, yet we manage to integrate our memories for these experiences together to form a coherent understanding of the world around us. How do we connect different but overlapping memories, such as different experiences that involved the same person?

I am happy to supervise projects on any topic related to my general interests:

1. Prejudice and intergroup relations: causes, consequences, and correlates of racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, or any other type of bias or discrimination.
2. Social identity: biculturalism, identity conflict and integration, social identity complexity.
3. Values and morality: causes and consequences of differences in value priorities and value instantiations, values in text, perceptions of morality.
4. Culture: Cross-cultural differences in psychological states or traits, culture as a moderator of known psychological effects."

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. Robot perception. How is our perception of humans and robots different? How do the way robots move influence the judgements we make about them? How can we make robots more accepted or trusted by changing the way they move?
2. Action perception. Can we improve action perception? Does Autism impact the judgements we make about other people's actions? We will test how visual adaptation can an enhance our ability to perceive action power, friendliness and intentionality. We will also investigate how Autism impacts these effects.
3. Facial expressions. Can we predict people's future behaviours from the way they move their face? We will test how synchrony between peoples' facial expressions can be used to predict their future actions and behaviours, this could include their response to news items, advertisements, multimedia, shopping items etc.

These are all lab-based projects that include presenting stimuli/videos on a computer screen and recording participant behavioural responses and/or filming participant faces in the lab and analysing their facial expressions. These projects are best run within groups - please contact me for further details.

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

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. Dark Triad and mate retention tactics online
3. 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 you will join a longitudinal project on developing proficiency in understanding fractions and decimal numbers in secondary school. You will get an opportunity to test children in early secondary school and also use existing data from earlier timepoints.  With the data a number of potential research questions can be investigated on mathematical development and how it relates to other domain-general skills (e.g. working memory, motivation and math anxiety).

Language and memory

 Much of what we learn about the visual world is accompanied by language, and we use language to communicate our thoughts, memories and experiences. I am interested in the interactions between language use, learning and memory. 

Some example questions are:

1. Does talking about the visual world (actions, objects, scenes) improve or distort recollection?
2.  Does verbally recalling previously seen events change visual memories?

Automated text analysis and mental health:

Artificial intelligence will likely change psychological practice. Many automated tools have been developed to quantify the emotional content of texts, e.g., sentiment analysis. Word counts or discourse coherence may also indicate people's emotional and cognitive states. I am interested in exploring whether these existing tools or other text analysis techniques can predict an individual's emotional well-being or cognitive abilities from ordinary conversational discourse.
Some example questions are
3. Does sentiment analysis of self-generated texts (or social media use) predict well-being?
4. What aspects of language use are linked to memory loss and dementia? There are existing databases that can be examined and correlated with objective diagnoses.

silvia.gennari@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.