Psychology

Facilities

Psychology students are housed in the same building as staff and laboratory space and technical support is provided where necessary; access is also available to the undergraduate research participation scheme. Research training can be accessed from the School of Psychology, the Graduate School and from external providers such as ESRC. A regular Psychology seminar series is held with visiting speakers from across the UK, staff regularly attend conferences in the UK and worldwide, and students are encouraged to do the same. The postgraduate research programme builds on a successful ESRC-accredited suite of MSc courses in various subfields of psychology, and all students are invited to join a relevant research group or groups to support their research beyond the supervisor-student relationship. There are opportunities for students to gain paid experience in teaching in psychology to support the undergraduate programme, one of the largest at Keele.
Research staff and students
There are a number of funded projects in Psychology, including two large projects related to the New Dynamics of Ageing Programme on social engagement in older people and the arts, a range of applied projects with Parkinson’s Disease patients, a project on domestic violence against men, research on child health, and studies of music workshops in special schools. Staff and postgraduate students publish across a very wide range of topic areas in internationally acclaimed journals covering topics such as community arts, health behaviour, ecopsychology, neuropsychological deficits, word recognition, and counselling psychology. This research attracts a high external profile: for example, studies of swearing in reducing pain, of time perception, and of children’s engagement with television have been covered by the national media. Recent PhDs have been in the areas of bullying in schools, time perception, context-dependent memory, school musical cultures, written emotional disclosure in adolescents, and mood regulation through music.