Join us for a Research Presentation on Emotion Processing and Bearded Faces by DR Craig on Tuesday 2nd April, 12-1pm

Social and Organisational Psychology Research Group Seminar

Please come and join us for:

WHAT: a research presentation by Dr Belinda Craig, University of New England.
WHEN: Tuesday 2rd April, 2019, 12-1pm
WHERE: Keats Reading Room AVLG17, Aviation Building, Callaghan (Video link to Ourimbah Meeting room, Science Offices; zoom linkZoom link:: https://uonewcastle.zoom.us/s/979950681
Zoom ID 979950681)

TITLE:Hairy and scary: Beards enhance recognition and detection of interpersonal threat signals

ABSTRACT: The beard is arguably one of the most obvious signals of masculinity in humans. Darwin suggested almost 150 years ago that beards evolved to communicate formidability to other males, but no studies have investigated whether beards enhance recognition or detection of interpersonal threat signals (like anger). I will present some of our recent findings demonstrating that the presence of a beard increases the speed and accuracy of recognizing anger. This effect is not due to shared evaluative or stereotypic associations between beardedness and negativity, as beards did not facilitate recognition of positive expressions (happiness) or of another negative expression, sadness, and beards increased rated prosociality of happy faces but also masculinity and aggressiveness of angry faces. Bearded faces are also detected faster in crowds than clean-shaven faces and the presence of a beard increases the magnitude of the search advantage for angry faces in crowds (anger superiority effect). Results suggest that beards may alter perceived facial structure, facilitating rapid judgments of threat on bearded men. Findings so far suggest that men’s facial hair impacts nonverbal communication and could influence social interactions beyond the lab and into men’s daily lives. This makes beards an interesting domain for further research.

BIO: Belinda Craig is currently a lecturer at the University of New England. Prior to this, she completed her PhD at The University of Queensland (2015) and a postdoc at Curtin University in Perth. She is interested in the areas of emotion and person perception. Most of her work investigates how we perceive information from the face and body (e.g., race, sex, age, emotion, eye-gaze, facial hair) and how this social information influences other cognitive processes like memory and attention.

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Call for Art/Science exhibits for a Watt Space exhibition on the 'Brain' (June 2019)

Together with a team from Psychology, Creative Industries, Engineering and Architecture, Dr Michelle Kelly is curating an Art/Science exhibition to be held at Watt Space in June 2019, called 'Brain'. 
Our vision for the exhibit is to enable real engagement between the University and the general public and showcase the wonderful Brain research being conducted by UON researchers and students. It is also an opportunity for students to practice science communication skills under a Work Integrated Learning platform.

We are welcoming submissions from UON staff and students for one of the exhibits. This exhibit will include a number of artistic brain images (cellular to whole brain level) as well as artistic images of the equipment that UON researchers use to examine the brain. The goal is to communicate the science we do in a way that the general public can enjoy and appreciate. 
Images will be displayed traditionally, printed, framed and wall hung, however, should we receive a large number of submissions we will also have a digital display. If you conduct research on the brain, we’d love to see what you do!

Students and staff are eligible to submit their images. A $100 gift voucher will be awarded to the best submission (public vote).
To submit, send the following to Michelle.Kelly@newcastle.edu.au  

a)      A digital copy of your image of quality that can be enhanced in size for printing (we will organise and cover costs for printing/framing)

b)      A short (less than 80 words) description of your image in layman terms, e.g., what it is, how you get that image, and what you are using it for.

c)    Please indicate also whether you are staff or a student.

We have attached an exceptional example by Dr Stuart Marlin (who is also a professional photographer). 

DUE DATE FOR SUBMISSIONS is APRIL 10, 2019.

Submitting an image implies agreement with a statement of Copyright you can request via email from from Michelle Kelly .

New Professor talk by Psychology's head-of-school, Prof Kristen Pammer

Last Thursday, as part of the public talk series by the University of Newcastle community events, Prof Kristen Pammer introduced a full house of eager listeners to both the promise and perils of autonomous cars.

The talk, held at the Newcastle Conservatorium, was one of the most well attended public lectures in the series, and was followed by an exciting Q&A session.

Details about past and future New Professors talks can be found here:
https://www.newcastle.edu.au/community-and-alumni/community-engagement/events-and-public-lectures/new-professors-talk

School of Psychology 2019 research seminars

The following school-wide research seminars are taking place throughout semester 1, 2019.

Please save these dates and see details in flyer below

Where:  Psychology Building, Keats Room AVLG-17 and Zoom link to Ourimbah EXSA-102

When: 12:00pm - 1:00pm

·       Week 2 - 6^th March

·       Week 4 - 20^th March

·       Week 6 - 3^rd April

·       Week 8 - 1^st May

·       Week 10 - 15^th May

·       Week 12 - 29^th May

UoN students and staff present at the Australian Math Psyc

Last week, students and staff from the School of Psychology at the University of Newcastle traveled to Melbourne for the annual meeting of the Australasian Society for Mathematical Psychology. among the topics presented were  Models of Memory, Consumer Choices, Methods for Estimating Cognitive Workload, and  more.

Next year's meeting is planned to take place in Sydney. Newcastle will host the 2021 meeting of the society, and it'd be great to have locals and guests alike, so mark Feb 2021 in your calendars.

Laura Waters presenting her work on developing a 3D environment for visual search experiments (more photos available on Leslie Blaha Twitter feed, @leslieblaha)

'work hard, play hard': AMPC attendees at the end of the traditional soccer game.

JUST PUBLISHED: new article on the relationship between between early life events and decision urgency

A new paper based on the PhD research of UoN graduate student Johanne Knowles examined the relationship between decision urgency and early life adversity. The article, co-authored with Nathan Evans and Darren Burke, can be accessed here:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00243/full

The relationship between early life adversity and adult outcomes is traditionally investigated relative to risk and protective factors (e.g., resilience, cognitive appraisal), and poor self-control or decision-making. However, life history theory suggests this relationship may be adaptive—underpinned by mechanisms that use early environmental cues to alter the developmental trajectory toward more short-term strategies. These short-term strategies have some theoretical overlap with the most common process models of decision-making—evidence accumulation models—which model decision urgency as a decision threshold. In the current paper, the authors examined the relationship between decision urgency (through the linear ballistic accumulator) and early life adversity. A mixture of analysis methods, including a joint model analysis designed to explicitly account for uncertainty in estimated decision urgency values, revealed weak-to-strong evidence in favor of a relationship between decision urgency and early life adversity, suggesting a possible effect of life history strategy on even the most basic decisions.   

Psychology and Computer Games

So, Psychologists study computer games as well !

This year, Macquarie University hosted Interactive Entertainment 2019, a satellite conference of the Australasian Computer Science Week. This conference brought together researchers and developers of games and digital entertainment from around Australia. Alex Thorpe, a PhD student from the Schools of Psychology and Engineering at UoN, presented research on the cognitive workload imposition of user interfaces, and the measurement of this imposition. This research focused on the detection response task (DRT) as an online, objective measure of workload in a continuous computer-based task. Alex and his co-authors were fortunate enough to be awarded Best Student Paper for their research.

link to the paper:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330371784_Assessing_Game_Interface_Workload_and_Usability_A_Cognitive_Science_Perspective

School of Psychology HDR confirmation day and other Xmas goodies

The School of Psychology had its first HDR festive confirmation day.

We thank Jaishree Jalewa, Mattsen Yeark, Gavin Cooper, and Jon Paul Cavallero, for presenting their research programs to an avid crowd of Psychology students and staff. The presentations spanned a variety of topics, from neuroscience to consumers' choices, and were of the highest quality.

The School also celebrated the end-of-year by acknowledging the hard work done over the past year, as can be seen in the photo ('work hard, play hard').

Merry xmas and happy holidays to all student, staff, and families.

School of Psychology HDR confirmation day, Dec 10, 2018

The School of Psychology at UoN is proud to host the first HDR 'group confirmation day'.

This is going to be an exciting and intellectually stimulating event, we hope you can all attend.

Four PhD candidates will present their research plan and progress to date. I have already seen some of the content and it is quite cool.

WHEN:
10th December 2018, starting 9:40am

WHERE:
Keats Building AV-LG-17, Psychology Building and via AV link to Ourimbah Science Room

WHO
* Student presenters: Jon-Paul Cavallaro, Mattsen Yeark, Gavin Cooper, Jaishree Jalewa
* Supervisors: Lauren Harms, Juanita Todd, Guy Hawkins, Scott Brown, Bryan Paton, Deborah Hodgson, Patricia Michie

All HDR students and staff members are welcome and encouraged to attend. Morning tea and pizza for lunch will be provided.

JUST PUBLISHED: Measuring the Personality of 27,415 Children

Miles Bore and Kristen Laurens, Megan Hobbs, Melissa Green, Stacy Tzoumakis, Felicity Harrris, and Vaughan Carr. Item response theory analysis of the Big Five Questionnaire for Children Short-Form (BFC-SF): A self-report measure of personality in children aged 11-12 years. Journal of Personality Disorders.

Some 12 or so years ago Miles became involved with the NSW Child Development project which started its life at UON under the direction of Professor Vaughan Carr. The project is following a cohort of children (and their parents) who started Kindergarten in NSW in 2009 through the linkage of health, education, child protection and justice records. As part of this larger project, the research team wanted to obtain self-report data from the children in what became the NSW Middle Childhood Survey (Laurens et al, 2017). We wanted to include a measure of personality. But, could 11 and 12 year olds reliably complete a self-report personality questionnaire? And, is personality sufficiently developed at this age to be measurable?

In a nutshell – yes.

We modified the Big Five Questionnaire for Children (Barbaranelli, et al, 2003) to create an English language short-form self-report measure of extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness (the ‘Big Five’). In 2015, children across NSW completed a 30 minute online battery at 829 schools under the administration of their teacher with the final sample being n = 27,415.

The data was then cleaned (a massive task lead by Melissa Green at UNSW), analysed and the Big Five findings published in the Journal of Personality Disorders. The Results section, undertaken and written by Prof Kristen Laurens (now at ACU Brisbane), is a work of art in its own right using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis and IRT techniques.

The questionnaire has good psychometric properties and (while more evidence is needed) does appear to measure the Big Five. Future research will now be able to examine the role of personality as part of the larger NSW Child Development linkage project.

The full paper can be found at: https://guilfordjournals.com/toc/pedi/0/0

School seminar Oct 31: How to do Bayesian analysis

Dear All,

Next school-wide research seminar is on next week,  Wednesday 31st October, 12:00pm - 1:00pm.

This seminar is a special one on how to do Bayesian analyses and will include hands-on practical exercises in Bayesian analysis

If you are planning to attend the workshop you will need to take these steps BEFORE attending:

  1. Bring your own laptop computer. 
  2. Install JASP. https://jasp-stats.org/faq/how-do-i-install-jasp/
  3. Save to your laptop the  zip file with example data files. It was sent in a separate email by Angaline Atkins. 
  3b. If you're not on that mailing list email me at ami.eidels@newcastle.edu.au and i'll send you a copy
  4. Wear Halloween costume. This is optional, but it improves learning outcomes. 

School of Psychology research seminar, Oct 17: ECR show and tell

SCHOOL WIDE RESEARCH SEMINAR - WED, 17th OCTOBER, 12-1pm

GUEST SPEAKERS: THE ECR COMMITTEE

TOPIC: Introducing the Psychology ECRs

Location: Keats AVLG-17 

and video conference to Ourimbah EXSA-102 Room

No rsvp required

Light refreshments will be provided

In this seminar, 7 of our very own psychology early career researchers will give you a 5-minute introduction to their research. Come along and learn more about what the ECRs do!

Here is a list of speakers and what they’ll be telling us about:

Guy Hawkins – How do we make simple and complex decisions?

Sally Hunt – Why women drink

Bryan Paton – Learning and predictions and consciousness, oh my!

Emily Freeman – Let’s play!

Sharon Hollins – Gutsy move… for a brain

Elise Kalokerinos  – Dealing with feelings      

Tara Clinton-McHarg – Changing systems – you know you want to…

Date: Wednesday 17th October 2018

Time: 12:00pm - 1:00pm

Newcastle hosts Specialised meeting on the science of social cohesion

UON School of Psychology's Social and Organizational Psychology Research Group (SOPRG) and  Newcastle-Oxford Research Centre on Conflict and Cohesion (NORCCC) are proud to announce the 2019 SASP-SPSSI group meeting, entitled “Advances in Intergroup Contact Research: Showcasing, Consolidating, Deconstructing and Innovating the Science of Social Integration” to be held in Newcastle, Australia between Monday 29th April and Wed 1st May, 2019. This exciting gathering will run as a post-conference meeting to the annual conference of the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists, running Thursday 25th/Saturday 27th April 2019 in Sydney.

This is an exciting time for research on intergroup contact. With a strong delegation of international and national delegates of varied seniority and background, this specialized gathering will showcase and advance the best research on the antecedents, dynamics, and consequences of intergroup contact across a multiplicity of research laboratories, research paradigms and methods, intergroup settings, and societies.

Through its intimate single session format, the gathering will include the delivery of conference papers (blitz / longer length / posters) by junior and senior researchers and roundtable discussions (small / plenary), this SASP-SPSSI group meeting on intergroup contact aspires to offer an exciting platform to consolidate our understanding and interpretation of key findings, to discuss emerging research trends and methodologies and forge the research and the researchers of the future.

The event will be organised by an enthusiastic committee that spans across three continents, including Stefania Paolini (the University of Newcastle, Australia), Miles Hewstone (the University of Newcastle, Australia; Oxford University, UK), Fiona White (University of Sydney, Australia), Fiona Barlow (The University of Queensland, Australia), Linda Tropp (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA), Liz Page-Gould (University of Toronto, Canada), Rhiannon Turner (Queen's University Belfast, UK) and Angel Gomez (National Distance Education University, Spain).

PENCIL THIS EVENT IN YOUR DIARY and WATCH THIS SPACE FOR UPDATES!

For ‘burning’ questions that cannot wait, contact Stefania

School of Psychology research seminar: Real-world impact of psychological research (Prof Miles Hewstone)

Wed, 26TH SEPTEMBER, 3-4pm

GUEST SPEAKER: Prof Miles Hewstone

Title: Real-world impact of psychological research: What it is, and some tips for how to achieve it

Prof Miles Hewstone (Oxford University and UON Global Innovation Chair on Social Cohesion) will share his experience from the UK REF (equivalent to our own ERA) research assessment process, and the increasing importance attached to research impact. Research impact is the effect that research has on “the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, environment, quality of life that is beyond academia”.

Two illustrative case studies will be considered – one from clinical psychology, and one from social psychology. Emphasis will be placed on how long it takes to have impact, and hence the need to identify potential impacts early, the need to work closely with people in the worlds of policy and practice, as well as government, and the need to document ‘impact’ as objectively as possible.

The seminar will be interactive, and we can hopefully discuss some of your own actual or developing impacts, and how to maximise their effectiveness.

Location: Keats AVLG-17

zoom conference to Ourimbah science room SOE.131-132 via link: https://uonewcastle.zoom.us/j/786538107

No rsvp required. Light refreshments will be provided