Research expertise
Psychology research students will lead in-depth advanced research projects that have significant impact on their specific field of study, and society more widely. Our research and knowledge exchange (RKE) enhances lives – making them better, safer and healthier within our communities and beyond. We are an inclusive and collaborative research community, actively engaging students and colleagues across disciplines. Our work is deeply connected to the people it serves, valuing the insights from those with lived experience as essential contributors. We are committed to producing high quality, purposeful and impactful RKE and we take pride in celebrating our shared achievements and progress.
Students join our research community that brings together researchers with diverse expertise across the diverse field of Psychology including these specialist topics that research students can focus on:
- Occupational Psychology: Values-based recruitment, coaching, resilience
- Mental Health: Adult and adolescent mental health, trauma, mood disorders, anxiety
- Social and Cognitive Psychology: Cognitive reasoning, emotional intelligence, evolutionary perspectives on human behaviour
- Counselling Approaches: CBT, suicide prevention
- Developmental Psychology: Family diversity, individual differences, Neurodiversity
- Forensic Psychology: Intimate partner violence, bystander interventions
Working under the careful supervision of these experienced researchers, postgraduate research students will explore key national and international issues that impact human health and wellbeing. Postgraduate research students are encouraged to apply cutting-edge approaches including multi and transdisciplinary perspectives to address pressing and complex contemporary challenges in psychology. Creating new knowledge about how we can better understand and respond in new ways to these challenges are themes that characterise the work of our postgraduate research students, including:
- Empathy, identity and therapeutic relationships
- Trauma, domestic violence and abuse, survivorship and lived experience
- Work, organisational culture, health and wellbeing
- Neurodiversity and social contexts
- Social inequality and stigma
- Families, caregiving and relationship shifts
We also have links with national and international industry, NHS partners, government and NGO environmental, and health groups and agencies, voluntary organisation and education institutions. Where possible we support students to collaborate with these organisations to enhance the relevance and application of their research.
Research supervisors
Dr Mikahil Sulaiman Azad
Expertise: Islamophobia studies; British Muslim Communities; honour- based abuse; structural inequalities; experiences in HE; qualitative methodologies with a focus on ethnographic approaches to research.
Professor Eleanor Bradley
Research specialisms: adult mental health; medicines conversations (information-exchange, concordance); family input and support (shared decision making, coproduction); non-medical prescribing; qualitative research. The application of health psychology theory to mental healthcare. Current projects include the input of families to shared decision making within adult mental healthcare, an exploration of the role of motivational interviewing as a resource for prescribing professionals to enhance communication within adult mental healthcare, and defining recovery within and between adult mental healthcare services.
Research methodologies: predominantly qualitative, with a particular interest in constructivist grounded theory.
Dr Tanya Carpenter
Expertise: mindfulness; sustainability and wellbeing; psychodynamic theory and therapy; attachment theory; relationships and the family; qualitative methodologies.
Dr Sarah Davis
Expertise: individual differences; emotional intelligence; child and adolescent development; personality; mental health; stress and coping; resilience; social cognition; attentional bias; longitudinal; experimental and cross-sectional research designs; psychometric validation; quantitative statistical methods including structural equation modelling and conditional process modelling (Mediation and moderation).
Dr Daniel Farrelly
Expertise: evolutionary perspectives on human behaviour, in particular social and cognitive psychology; quantitative, experimental methods.
Dr Beverley Gilbert
Expertise: domestic abuse; gender-based violence; community peer mentoring of women with multiple and complex needs and community strengths; women’s survival; qualitative (including IPA), feminist and ethical methodologies interventions; violence intervention and effective work with perpetrators of domestic abuse.
Dr Kath Gordon-Smith
Expertise: comorbidities (physical and psychiatric) of major mood disorders; quantitative, longitudinal mood measures in bipolar disorder.
Dr Gillian Harrop
Expertise: violence and sexual violence; false allegations; domestic abuse; police investigation.
Professor Lisa Jones
Expertise: aetiology of major mood disorders (including bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis).
Research methodologies: quantitative, longitudinal measures in major mood disorders.
Dr Ali Khoshfetrat
Expertise: clinical psychology; mental health; psychological and social risk factors for mental health problems; experiences of psychological interventions; quantitative methods and qualitative methodologies.
Dr Naomi Lee
Expertise: mental health and mental disorders (focus on mood disorders) cognitive bias; mental health interventions; quantitative methods.
Dr Béré Mahoney
Expertise: living with long-term conditions, with a focus on allergy and cancer; self-diagnosis of physical and mental illness; victimisation and survivorship of crime; qualitative and quantitative methods and methodologies including the analysis of ‘Big Data’; mixed and multi-methods research; transdisciplinary approaches to research.
Dr Claire McLoone-Richards
Expertise: domestic and sexual abuse; violence prevention including public health responses; historical and cultural perspectives on childhood and institutional abuse, familicide, sibling violence; child abuse; professional advocacy and practice; qualitative methodologies and mixed research.
Dr Blaire Morgan
Expertise: psycholinguistics, education, positive psychology, social psychology, moral education and virtue ethics; quantitative, mixed methods.
Dr Helen Scott
Expertise: occupational psychology; empathy and emotional intelligence; resilience; training and development interventions to support employee psychological wellbeing.
Research methodologies: quantitative, mixed methods.
Dr Charlotte E Taylor
Expertise: public health; living with long-term conditions; qualitative, quantitative and mixed research.
Dr Felix Why
Expertise: personality, individual differences; health psychology; occupational psychology; predictors of health, health behaviour and behaviour change; quantitative methods and psychometrics.
Research groups
Postgraduate Research Students are encouraged to join Research Groups at the University, and those with significant focus on Psychology include: