By Catherine Hall The theme for this year’s British Science Week is connections and we thought it would be a good opportunity to ask one of our psychology lecturers, Dr Catherine Hall to tell us some of the reasons why connections and collaborations are so important to research success. Since my days as a PhD student, the thing I have found most exciting about science is the way that your experimental results continually change the way you understand the world,  throwing open ever more questions that you need to answer in order to find out if you are right to think that way! I love that ..read more

By Kerry Moor We asked one of our current 2022-23 Psychology Professional placement students to tell us about their experience so far. Kerry is completing an internal research placement with the School of Psychology for the Sussex Centre for Research on Kindness. A Professional Placement year is completed between your second and final year of undergraduate study. Halfway through my second year, I had a sudden realisation that I needed a break from my Psychology degree. As a driven person, I wanted to redirect my life towards goals I wanted to achieve and things I wanted to learn, instead of be ..read more

By Louise Davidson According to Part Two of the public inquiry into the Manchester Arena Attack, one of the key problems with the response on the night was that the three emergency services failed to act as one team. Instead, the Police, Fire, and Ambulance Services were working as three separate teams. One aspect of the Manchester Arena Attack that distinguishes it from day-to-day emergencies (e.g., burglaries, small house fires, and heart attacks) is the required joint nature of the response by the Police, Fire, and Ambulance Service.  The Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Prin ..read more

By Professor Gillian Forrester image credit: David Stock (New Scientist) My research strives to understand how we became the upright walking, talking, tool-using great apes that we are today – both through the evolution of our species and through the development of infants. I study the behaviours and brains of both neuro-typically and non-neuro-typically developing children and our great ape relatives (chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans) and aim to develop comparative research approaches that place human cognitive development within an evolutionary framework. My most recent project has both a d ..read more

September was World Alzheimer’s Month, an international event run by Alzheimer’s Disease International to spread awareness and challenge the stigmas that surround Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Alzheimer’s is a degenerative neurological condition that is currently affecting more than 944,000 people in the UK and Alzheimer’s disease accounts for 60-70% of these cases. Alzheimer’s is progressive and, currently, irreversible with treatment limited to alleviating the symptoms and delaying the progression of the disease. But it isn’t all doom and gloom! Research is currently being done a ..read more

In the Summer, I attended the 2022 annual conference of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). This took place over four days in a very sweaty Athens and was a pretty mad event, with over 850 delegates attending nine parallel sessions at a time. For me there were two standouts. The first was a ‘commemorating panel’ in honour of Jim Sidanius, of whom, I freely admit, I had never heard. However, with Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington of the LSE as chair I couldn’t miss it, and I now know that Sidanius was a giant of social psychology whose book, Social Dominance, changed her life ..read more

By Georgina Ogborn, BSc Psychology Graduate My third-year dissertation project at Sussex was the culmination of my university studies and an important step towards realising my ambition to work in the field of clinical psychology. My project investigated the topic of barbershops as a community setting to support male mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic. This topic is important because around one in eight men experience mental health difficulties, yet most do not seek help and men are under-represented in mental health service referrals. Previous research has shown that barbers can succ ..read more

By Dr Anna Rabinovich I am excited to join the vibrant and friendly School of Psychology at the University of Sussex as a Reader in Social Psychology and Sustainability. My research ambition is to address the global challenge of cooperation around sustainable management of shared environmental resources by conducting impactful research that makes a real difference for stakeholder communities. It has led me to develop multiple interdisciplinary collaborations and to engage with diverse communities who face the shared resource management challenge across the world. One of my recent projects, fun ..read more

By Chloe Ilsley After several years of not being able to celebrate our graduates and their achievements, this year we were finally able to do so! On 21st July 2022, the Psychology Student Experience Team hosted the Finalist Party, and all graduates were invited from 2020 – 2022. The Finalist Party took place the morning of the Class of 2022 graduation ceremony. It was a great day for celebration as the sun was shining and the sky was clear, this was perfect for the garden party theme. The Meeting House and its unforgettable colourful windows were the backdrop to the party. We wanted our Finali ..read more

By Psychology PhD student, Louise Davidson The Science of Teamwork Teamwork is something that most of us engage in every day – for example, within a work team or a sports team. We know the members of our teams… their names, their strengths, their weaknesses, and their role within the team. We consider them to be part of ‘us’. There is an abundance of evidence to show that when we feel like we belong to a team, we generally work well with its members. This sense of ‘us-ness’ provides a strong basis for coordination and cooperation that is vital for teamwork through providing team members with s ..read more