SCHOOL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY NEWSLETTER
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ISSUE 3
School of [Article Author] Experimental Psychology Newsletter
September 2016 – August 2017
From the Head of School, Chris Jarrold It is my pleasure to introduce our annual newsletter for 2016-2017, which highlights some of the many successes and achievements that our students and staff have been involved in during the past 12 months. These range from awards for both teaching and research excellence to new activities for the School such as the instigation of our External Advisory Board. As we move into a new academic year, and welcome a new intake of students, we look forward to further exciting developments, and to working collectively together to promote the School.
Awards Claire Haworth wins Spearman Medal for outstanding research in Psychology Dr Claire Haworth, Reader in Behavioural Genetics and co-director of the Dynamic Genetics Lab, was awarded the 2017 Spearman Medal from the British Psychological Society. Claire, who joined the School in 2015, was awarded the medal in recognition of her work on the dynamic nature of genetic and environmental influences on human behaviour. The Spearman Medal, inaugurated in 1965, is awarded annually for outstanding published work in psychology representing a significant body of research. This year there are two winners of the medal; Dr Haworth, and Dr Rachael Jack of the University of Glasgow.
Produced by Ian Harrison, School of Experimental Psychology
SCHOOL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Stephan Lewandowsky appointed Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Professor Stephan Lewandowsky from the School of Experimental Psychology and the Cabot Institute was among 47 leading social scientists who have been conferred as Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2017. Steve is an eminent social scientist and an expert on the application of computational modelling to social science questions. He has an international reputation for his studies of human memory, which have prompted key work on the extent to which information that is initially presented as factual, but then retracted, is still believed.
Marcus Munafò receives Presidents’ Award from The British Psychological Society In July, Professor Marcus Munafò received the 2017 Presidents' Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Knowledge by the British Psychological Society. The highly prestigious award confers life membership of the Society and recipients are invited to deliver the Presidents' Award Lecture at annual conference. Marcus is a programme lead within the University’s MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit which conducts some of the UK's most advanced population health science research, using genetics, population data and experimental interventions to look for the underlying causes of chronic disease.
Josie Briscoe wins Science Faculty Award for Education 'In recognition of excellence in education and the enhancement of the student experience.' At the 2017 Bristol Teaching Awards, held on Tuesday 6th 2017 June in the Great Hall of Wills Memorial Building, Dr Josie Briscoe was announced as the Science Faculty’s winner of the University Award for Education. Josie was nominated for her 'innovative ideas and keen eye for detail' in relation to the 'Jamboree Days' that she had helped start three years ago to provide a 'scalable, sustainable and efficient means of improving assessment skills, with Josie's ceaseless enthusiasm, energy and commitment vital to its success'. We were delighted that, on the night, Josie was announced as the winner of the Science Faculty's Award.
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Green Impact Awards 2017 Green Impact is a departmental sustainability accreditation scheme, run by NUS (National Union of Students) where staff and students take simple sustainability actions, contributing to a Greener University. The annual Green Impact Awards ceremony took place on Thursday, 22nd June in the Wills Memorial Building reception room. Professor Judith Squires, Pro ViceChancellor for Education and Students, presented 41 awards to 30 teams, celebrating their efforts to improve sustainability during the past year. The School of Experimental Psychology has been working for the last 5 months towards achieving the 'Starter for Ten' Green Impact award. With help from Anna Blackwell, Olivia Maynard, Olivia Abrams, Katie Drax and Ian Harrison, the school was successful in achieving this award.
New Projects Chris Kent and Jess Fielding awarded Bristol Institute for Learning and Teaching, Teaching Innovation Grant This grant will help develop and plan a revision of the way in which we teach our research methods and statistics undergraduate courses. We are looking to work with the students to develop a course that helps build confident, engaged researchers through active partnership and problem based learning. Over the next academic year, via peer review sessions, action working groups, Science CafÊ’s, and formal unit evaluation, we will work with students to identify areas of the course that they find most challenging and work with them to better design assessments to enable them to overcome these challenges. After evaluation, we will use the evidence-base and materials produced to redesign our teaching of introductory psychological experiments and statistics.
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Jeffrey Bowers awarded an ERC Advanced grant of â‚Ź2.5 million The European Research Council (ERC) awarded Professor Jeffrey Bowers an ERC Advanced grant in early 2017. These grants support exceptional, professorial-level research leaders in undertaking ground-breaking, high-impact research project Jeff is one of four Bristol academics to receive a European Research Council Advanced Grant this year. These grants are awarded to established academics who have a trackrecord of significant research achievements and the sole criterion for these grants is excellence. The grant explores how well artificial neural networks can support human performance in a range of tasks, from object and word identification to playing games.
Jon Brooks involved in large Medical Research Council Project As part of a large grant awarded by the Medical Research Council, Jon Brooks will team up with researchers from King's College London to investigate the underlying mechanisms of chronic pain using functional imaging. Chronic pain (pain lasting longer than 3-6 months) poses a significant burden to patients, their relatives/helpers and society in general. Approximately one in five people (particularly women and the elderly) will be affected by chronic pain during their lifetime, and they may struggle to obtain adequate pain relief. Their pain, which started life as a warning signal following damage to the body, lasted longer than the time it took for the body to heal. Why pain persists is not well understood. However, it is now thought that chronic pain is, in itself, a disease of the nervous system rather than something arising solely from the damaged part of the body. The Medical Research Council under its Experimental Medicine scheme have awarded ÂŁ3.3M to Professor Stephen McMahon and Dr Matt Howard, King's College London, with Dr Brooks a co-Investigator. The grant "Stratifying Chronic Pain Patients by Pathological Mechanism - A Multimodal Investigation Using Functional MRI, Psychometric and Clinical Assessment" aims to understand the different contributions each part of the nervous system makes to the development and maintenance of chronic pain. These studies will involve patients and healthy subjects, and will try to measure the nervous system response to pain using advanced imaging techniques. Jon has pioneered the development and application of these methods, particularly in the spinal cord and brainstem, which are parts of the nervous system that are thought to generate and maintain symptoms of chronic pain.
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Selected Research Highlights Sarah Griffiths: Impaired recognition of basic emotions from facial expressions in young people with autism spectrum disorder: assessing the importance of expression intensity. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Griffiths, S., Jarrold, C., Penton-Voak, I. S., Woods, A. T., Skinner, A. L., & Munafò, M. R. (in press). A team from the School, led by PhD student Sarah Griffiths gave children and adolescents with and without a diagnosis of autism spectrum conditions (ASC), an internet-based test of emotion recognition. The two groups, aged between 6 - 16 years-old, were presented with ‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘surprised’, ‘disgusted’, ‘scared’ and ‘angry’ facial expressions and asked to select a label that matched the expression. The team also measured language skills and non-verbal reasoning skills to see if differences in these skills explained any differences in ability to recognise emotions. The results showed that young people with ASC do find it harder to recognise emotion from facial expressions. However, the types of mistake made by young people with ASC were very similar to the types of mistake made by young people without ASC. For example, young people in both groups often mistook ‘fear’ for ‘surprise’ and confused ‘disgust’ and ‘anger’.
Gaurav Malhotra and Casimir Ludwig: Time-varying decision boundaries: insights from optimality analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1-26. - Malhotra, G., Leslie, D. S., Ludwig, C. J., & Bogacz, R. (2017).
Overcoming indecision by changing the decision boundary. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 146(6), 776. Malhotra, G., Leslie, D. S., Ludwig, C. J., & Bogacz, R. (2017). How long do you spend in making a decision? Most models of decision making in psychology assume that you collect evidence in favour of the available options and commit to an option when the evidence for it crosses a pre-determined decision criterion. But in the real world, one doesn't make decisions in isolation. The more time that you spend making a decision, the less time you have available for all the subsequent decisions. In a paper published in PBnR, Gaurav, Casimir and colleagues mathematically model this trade-off and predict that under many circumstances it is not optimal for decision-makers to wait for a fixed decision criterion to be met before they make a decision. Rather, it makes sense to revise this criterion as time passes. Then, in a paper published in JEP: General, they reported a large number of experiments in which the optimal decision strategy was manipulated. They found that people indeed modulate their decision criterion based on the optimal strategy, although there were also notable and interesting departures from optimality. Both papers have major implications not only for mechanistic models of decision-making, but also for design of decision-making experiments.
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Marcus Munafo - Current Incentives for Scientists Lead to Underpowered Studies with Erroneous Conclusions. Higginson AD1, Munafò MR2,3.
There is growing interest in what has become known as the reproducibility crisis, stimulated in part by growing empirical evidence that many published research findings cannot be replicated. Together with colleagues in biological sciences, we modelled the current scientific “ecosystem” and showed that current incentives that prioritise a small number of novel, eye-catching findings (i.e., those published in journals with a high Impact Factor) are likely to result in studies that are too small, and give unreliable findings. This strategy is optimal for career advancement in the current system, but not optimal for science.
Stephan Lewandowsky – Computational Modeling of Cognition and Behaviour Computational modeling in psychology has come of age. The increases in computing power have brought as closer to achieving a truly meaningful interaction between computational models of cognition and experimental theories and data. But there is still a divide between experimental psychologists and computational modelers. Most cognitive psychologists accept and appreciate the rigorous theorizing that modeling permits, but their computational skills generally do not allow them to go much beyond appreciation from a distance. This problem is compounded by the lack of easily-accessible training in modeling techniques in many universities. A forthcoming new book on modeling authored by Simon Farrell and Stephan Lewandowsky (Farrell, S., & Lewandowsky, S., 2018, Computational modeling of cognition and behavior. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press) may enable researchers in cognition to acquire the skills necessary to engage in computational modeling. The book starts out with the very basics, namely why computational models present a more powerful tool than verbal theorizing and experimentation, and it then takes the reader on an exploration of basic principles (e.g., parameter estimation techniques), intermediate concepts (e.g., model selection), to more advanced topics (e.g., hierarchical Bayesian models). The book relies on the R statistical programming language, and although it does not teach the reader programming from the ground up, there are examples in the text that illustrate the programming code for all the concepts being introduced.
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A study of the health implications of mobile phone use in 8-14s. J Fowler, J Noyes - Dyna, 2017 - dialnet.unirioja.es Mobile phone use is increasing worldwide. The physical, cognitive and social health implications of mobile phone use in young users are considered. A survey of 168 children aged 8-11 and 136 children aged 11-14 is reported. Participants completed questionnaires about their mobile phone use with follow-up interviews to elicit more in depth information about reasons for using mobile phones. Findings suggest users are at risk of muscular skeletal problems from mobile phone use, radio frequency damage from storage of the phone on the body, particularly when the person is ‘on the move’, and impaired performance from multi-tasking and sleep disturbance. Since long term or heavy usage of mobile phones is an unknown factor, caution is needed with regard to the risks associated with these findings.
Teaching News
MSci Student, Megan Florence, Speaks at Bristol Strategy Launch Megan Florence, one of the first students to embark on our new MSci Psychology with Innovation programme, was selected to talk about her experiences of Bristol at the launch of the University’s new strategy event, held at the Great Hall, Wills Memorial Building on 29 November 2016.
This large event, attended by over 360 guests and hosted by Prof Hugh Brady (Vice-Chancellor and President), unveiled the University’s new vision and our ambitions for the evolution and growth of the University; including the creation of a multi-million-pound second campus in the city. Megan shared the stage with the Vice-Chancellor, the Bristol Mayor (Marvin Rees), the leader of Oracle’s Bristol cloud development centre (Phil Bates) and a second MSci Innovation student (Holly Simpson, studying Anthropology).
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Congratulations to our Spring 2017 MSc and PhD Graduates On Thursday, 16th February 2017, the School of Experimental Psychology celebrated the graduation of its Masters students as well as many PhD students who received their doctorates. Families were brought together to enjoy a very pleasant occasion celebrating at Clifton Hill House. As a School, we are immensely proud of all our students and have enjoyed the privilege and responsibility of teaching, supporting and working with them during their time with us. Congratulations also go to the following prize winners: Jacob Brain, Diana Ramirez Hernandez, Millie Marshall, Bryn Williams and Alexandra Howat, Gavin Brown and Madeline Dyer
Congratulations to our Summer 2017 Graduates On Tuesday, 18th July 2017, we celebrated the graduation of our third-year (BSc) and fourth-year (MSci) students. Families from around the world came together and enjoyed this special occasion in the Priory Road Complex with prosecco and cake.
Congratulations to all our BSc Prize winners: Mubaraka Muchhala, Georgia Tyler, Jacks Bennett, Kira Griffiths, Steph Bryant, Zara Harper, Amber Heath, Jia Ming Ho, Polly Howard, Lana Jagger, Olivia Jones, Anna Kemp, Max Lawrence, Ryan Nelson, Laura O’Brien, Olivia Pavlou-Graham, Lily Pratt, Becca Prosser, Tilly Robinson, Alesi Rowland, Zoe Travers, Alex Votier, Isobel Wadsworth
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The School of Experimental Psychology hosts the South West Undergraduate Psychology Conference 2017 The School of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, hosted the annual SWUC event this year. The South West Undergraduate Psychology Conference was held on Saturday, 18th March. Students from across the South West came to present their Year 3 project findings through both oral presentations and poster displays. The day was felt to be a great success with some fantastic project work being reported. The day ended with a prize giving and excellent keynote lecture from Dr Angela Rowe from the School of Experimental Psychology, on the topic of 'attachment theory as a framework for understanding mental health conditions'. The following oral presentations were given by our Undergraduate Students: Katie Drax: Know your limits: The effect of alcohol warning labels on drink choice behaviour Rose O'Connell: New contacts, new NHS? The world of the current UK medical student Lewis Harland: Investigating embodiment choice frameworks in risky and safe decisions-fromexperience Christopher Moreno-Stokoe: Bilinguals appear to have better attention abilities Georgia Todd: The relationship between exam stress and physical activity on wellbeing and exam success Posters were also provided by ChloĂŤ Macmillian, Stephanie Bryant, Giulia Todres, Mischa Dhar, Alesi Rowland and Esther Rosser. Many thanks to all the students who came along to take part in the day and congratulations to all the prize winners.
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Notable Events Women in STEMM Outreach Event The School of Experimental Psychology took part in an outreach event celebrating women in Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine and Maths (STEMM). A combination of undergraduate and postgraduate students talked to year 8 and 9 pupils from local schools about research in Psychology and provided them with an opportunity to participate in demonstrations. On the 11th October 2016 the University of Bristol celebrated women in Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine and Maths (STEMM) as part of the international Ada Lovelace day. In conjunction with that celebration the University arranged a woman in STEMM outreach event with local schools aiming to showcase women in STEMM activities by demonstrating experiments and discoveries by female scientists, and giving children and opportunity to speak to female STEMM academics.
Athena Swan Submission In April 2017, we submitted an application to renew our Athena Swan Bronze award. The application was compiled by a representative 12-person selfassessment team that included academic and research staff, undergraduate and post-graduate students, Professional Services staff and University Human Resources staff. The application underwent School-wide consultation before submission. The application builds on important successes achieved since our last Athena Swan award, including an increased number of female Readers that reflects both progression of current staff and recruitment of new female staff. The 2017 Athena Swan submission identified three core working initiatives, which provide a framework for the planned activity. Key actions include promoting the University’s positive working policy and implementing best practice to support positive working environments for all (Working Lives Initiative); increasing visibility of female role models and of ED&I (Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity) activity across the School (Positive Culture Initiative); and development of a comprehensive mentoring framework bringing together information on current activities and developing new activities to meet any unmet needs (Career Progression Initiative). We expect to hear the outcome of our application in late 2017.
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External Advisory Board (EAB) The first Experimental Psychology EAB meeting was held on the 20th June at Goldney Hall. It was a gloriously sunny day! The EAB is chaired internally by Chris Jarrold and externally by Steve Gatfield. Chris needs no introduction but Steve is a leading expert in global marketing and media communications, an investor in various digital start-up companies in and around Bristol and a Bristol Experimental Psychology graduate. The external board members were chosen on the basis of the key roles they play in the Bristol and regional psychology sectors (including educational and clinical psychology) or on the basis that they are from industries (e.g., Unilever, Cambridge Cognition, Just Eat), charities (e.g., MQ mental health) or other sectors (e.g., publishing, the school sector) relevant to our research and teaching. Between them, our board members will be instrumental in ensuring that as a School we remain informed and competitive in research and teaching and that we maximise the employability of our graduates. This initial meeting was focused on “getting to know each other”. We had talks about the University (by Guy Orpen), the School (by Chris Jarrold), our programmes (by Brian), our research (by Chris Jarrold for Ian Penton-Voak) and our student experience (by Sanni). We also had a short research talk (by Nina Kazanina) and heard from the external board members about the challenges they face in their particular sectors/organisations. Finally, in what turned out to be an action-packed day, we spent some time discussing how the School and the external board members might best work together in collaboration. Overall it was a successful day and meeting. The next EAB meeting is planned for December 2017.
Blue plaque to commemorate Professor Richard Gregory A blue plaque to commemorate the life and work of a great interdisciplinary thinker, whose interest was in optical illusions and what these revealed about human perception, was unveiled in May 2017. Professor Richard Gregory, CBE, DSc, FRSE, FRS (19232010), was a leading Bristol academic and psychologist who spent much of his career within the School and whose passing in 2010 was keenly felt by all. The plaque was unveiled by the Lord Mayor with family, friends and colleagues, at the Workhouse Café, at the bottom of St Michaels Hill, a central point for vision scientists. This cafe was where Richard rediscovered an illusion contained in the tiles. Professor David Bull, Director of the Bristol Vision Institute, said: “Richard was an experimental psychologist whose work has been crucial to our understanding of sensory, and in particular visual, perception and illusion.
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