Thursday 13 September 2012

July and August Have Been Busy!

Message from Head of School
The last two months have been busy for the School. By way of example:
-- our School Planning Day was held on Tuesday 17 July at Raffety’s resort at which we discussed the University and School’s strategic plans for the future
--  our new Master of Applied Health and Business Psychology program was successfully presented to Faculty and Senate committees
-- we produced an improvement overall in the School’s semester 1 Student Feedback of Courses surveys
-- and, as you will see below, the School’s research effort continued with gusto!
All Good News! And here is more …
Kind Regards
Miles


Welcome Dr Sirous Mobini
Sirous has started with us as a Senior Lecturer in clinical psychology. His research interests include experimental psychopathology, cognitive bias modification (CBM), behavioural, cognitive and biological aspects of impulsivity, computerised self-help CBT, neuropsychological research, and stroke and brain injury rehabilitation.


Recognition for Juanita Todd
Juanita has been elected to serve on the board of directors for the International Organisation of Psychophysiology for a 6-year term. This is a wonderful recognition of Juanita’s professional reputation.


A major step forward for the research effort at Ourimbah championed by Linda Campbell
The FIND (Family Interaction and Neurodevelopmental Disorder) lab at Ourimbah is now operational with a new SR EYELink-1000 eyetracker installed. If anyone is interested in using our equipment, we will have a visit from SR between the 25-28th of September.


Visitors
Welcome to Prof Markku Penttonen from the Department of Psychology, University of Yyväskylä in Finland who is spending the next 2 months with us (Sept and Oct) under the Faculty Visiting Fellow scheme. He will working with Lauren, Deb, Ross, Mick and Pat and others on their NHMRC grant and assisting in developing techniques using the new rat EEG data acquisition system. Markku will be presenting a school colloquium on 20 Sept.

Dr Sylvie Graff from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic has been awarded funding from the Academy and the University of Newcastle’s Emerging Research Leaders program to visit Mark Rubin and Stefania Paolini from October 2012 to June 2013.


RHD International Experience
Jay Richards (Supervisor Martin Johnson) gave a presentation of his research at 30th International Congress of Psychology in Cape Town, July 2012. Improving the Predictive and Explanatory Power of Fear Appeal Theory: The Case for Theoretical Integration.

Heather Douglas (Supervisors Miles Bore and Don Munro) presented her research findings at the European Conference on Personality

Douglas H, Bore M, Munro D. (2012). The five-factor theory of personality: Examination of structure using SEM. 2012 European Conference on Personality, Trieste Italy, 10-14 July.


Staff and Students Publication
Rubin, M., & Badea, C. (in press). They’re all the same!...but for several different reasons: A review of the multicausal nature of perceived group variability. Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Hawkins, G., Rae, B., Nesbitt, K. & Brown, S.D. (in press). Game-like features might not improve data. Behavior Research Methods.

Sinderberry, B., Brown, S.D., Hammond, P., Stevens, A.F., Schall, U., Murphy, D.G., Murphy, K.C. & Campbell, L. (in press) Subtypes in 22q11.2 deletion syndrome associated with behaviour and neurofacial morphology. Research in Developmental Disabilities.

Ho, T.C., Brown, S.D., Abuyo, N.A., Kul, E.-H.J. & Serences, J.T. (in press) Perceptual consequences of feature-based attentional enhancement and suppression. Journal of Vision.

Peacock, A., Bruno, R., & Martin, F.H. (2012). The subjective physiological, psychological and behavioural risk-taking consequences of alcohol and energy drink co-ingestion. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research published online (also picked up by Eureka Alert where a summary is now published)

Grace, A., Kemp, N., Martin, F.H., & Parrila. R. (2012) Students' use of text messaging language: Effects of place and collection method Writing Systems Research, iFirst, 1-18.

Walla, P., and Panksepp, J. (2012). Neuroimaging helps to clarify brain affective processing without necessarily clarifying emotions. Intech. In press

Walla, P., Mavratzakis, and Bosshard, S., (2012). Neuroimaging to Research Affective Processing and to Deliver to Consumer Neuroscience. Intech. In press

Grahl, A., Greiner, U. & Walla, P. (2012). Bottle Shape Elicits Gender-Specific Emotion: A Startle Reflex Modulation Study. Psychology, 3, 548-554.


From Peter Walla …
Peter has been invited to join editorial boards of Current Research in Psychology and Psychology
And conference papers:

Herbert, C. and Walla, P. (2012). Conference presentation (Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness; Brighton, UK). Inferring interactions between emotions and the self during reading of self-related words by means of EEG and fMRI.

Chalup, S, Oswald and Walla, P. (2012). Conference presentation (Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture; Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, USA). Simulating Mechanisms of Emotion Associated with Visual Perception of Urban Space: An Artificial Agent’s Perspective.

Walla, P. and Koller, M. (2012). Conference presentation (Neuropsychoeconomics conference; Rotterdam, Netherlands). Startle reflex modulation enriches the methodological spectrum in consumer neuroscience.

Koller, M., and Walla, P. (2012). Conference presentation (extended paper) (International Conference on Information Systems; Orlande, Florida, USA). Measuring Affective Information Processing in Information Systems and Consumer Research - Introducing Startle Reflex Modulation.