Potential Areas of Study for PhD's

The academics in RASPH are always interested to hear from suitably qualified students who are considering studying for a PhD. Each academic has listed potential areas of study they would be willing to supervise. Please research your area first and then contact the academic via email. For information regarding current and previous RASPH PhD's please refer to the members page.
In addition to being eligible for a variety of Research-Council funded studentships, the School of Psychology offers around ten studentships per year for study toward PhD. Applications for funding are competitive. The studentships include:

· Tax-free stipend (£12,000 per year)

· Tuition fees for home students (£3,010 per year)

· Research Training Support Grant (£1,000 per year).

For further information on application procedures and funding refer to the the School of Psychology admissions.

Prof Eamonn Ferguson

I am interested in supervising PhD students is the following areas:

1. Altruism and human helping behaviour
a. For example, i. the role of emotion and egoistic and altruistic motives ii. the moderating effects of the cost of helping
2. Health anxiety
a. For example, i. the role of implicit cognitive processing
3. Symptom reporting
a. For example, i. the role of odour ii. factors that increase the ability to distinguish specific from non-specific symptoms

The above are general idea, but I welcome suggested ideas in all of these areas. For more detail and recent publications please go to my home pages. Please feel free to contact me with informal suggestions at Eamonn.ferguson@nottingham.ac.uk

Dr Ellen Townsend

1)Mental health:
The role of hope as a protective factor
Mental health first aid
2) Self harm: attitudes towards, interventions, protective factors, psychological moderators/mediators
3) Risk and emotion/risky decision making (e.g. in relation to self harm, binge drinking and other health-risk behaviours).

Dr Claire Lawrence

I would be interested in supervising PhD students in projects relating to the following:

1. Individual differences in:
the exhibition of violence and aggression
the perception of aggression
sensitivity to aggressive triggers
frustration intolerance

2. Factors influencing the way that aggression and violence is perceived
3. The relationship between psychoticism and psychopathy
4. Cognitive processing of aggressive stimuli

Please contact me for more information, or for discussions about related ideas. My home page can be seen here.

Dr Martin Hagger

I am interested in supervising PhD/summer internships in the following areas:

1) Telling the difference between plans and goals – most studies do not focus on ‘goal intentions’ when outlining plans to engage in behaviour, but focus on ‘intentions’ alone. The purpose of investigations in this area is to look at how intentions have traditionally focused on plans to do a behaviour alone and neglected peoples goals, and how providing goals can help explain behaviour more effectively (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Gollwitzer, 1999).

(2) Personality and intrinsic motivation – do we have a natural propensity to be intrinsically motivated? The aim is to examine whether people are intrinsically motivated to behave because of the situation or because they have a behavioural trait that predisposes them to do so (Deci & Ryan, 1985).

(3) What is the difference between motivation and attitudes? – are people able to distinguish between attitudes towards something and motivation to do something? Alternatively, are attitudes and motives inextricably linked? The purpose would be to look at this question from a self-determination theory perspective (Hagger, Chatzisarantis, Barkoukis, Wang, & Baranowski, 2005; Hagger, Chatzisarantis, Culverhouse, & Biddle, 2003).

(4) Implicit or explicit motives? There has been a renewed interest in implicit processes in social psychology (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). Research into these processes aims to determine the relative contribution of explicit, deliberative, and reflective influences and implicit, automatic, and impulsive influences on behaviour (Strack & Deutsch, 2004). Recently, this has been extended to motivation (Kehr, 2004) and I am interested in supervising projects examining the influence of implicit and explicit forms of intrinsic motivation on behaviour, extending the research in implicit intrinsic motivation that has been done before (Burton, Lydon, D'Alessandro, & Koestner, 2006; Levesque & Pelletier, 2003).

Dr David Clarke