Tuesday 22 March 2016

Early parenthood experiences of infertile couples after successful fertility treatment: SRIP award

Olga van den Akker and Helen Allan with colleagues at De Montfort (Lorraine Culley), Dundee (Andrew Symon) and Flinders University in Austraila (Sheryl de Lacey) have won a Society for Reproductive and Infant Psychology developmental grant award (http://www.srip.ac.uk/)  to run a workshop to develop a collaborative team to investigate the implications of IVF/ICSI conception and delivery of a baby for couples' lives in early parenthood. 

This topic is underexplored in the literature internationally. There is a potential health need identified in existing research but ignored by policy makers although acknowledged by service users in the UK. We will address this gap in research with our focus on transition to early parenthood for infertile couples, on fatherhood as well as motherhood and on our use of mixed methods as an interdisciplinary team which includes a strong service user perspective. This work has relevance both nationally and internationally.

Monday 21 March 2016

New CATS grant - Police Knowledge Fund

CATs has been successful in a new grant. This was written by Jeffrey DeMarco for the Police Knowledge Fund and concerns evaluation of the Volunteer Police Cadet programme.  This seeks to engage teenagers and reduce rates of antisocial behaviour. Julia Davidson is PI and Jeffrey and Toni Bifulco are Co-Is. Jeffrey studied this group (and others) when devising his Trust in Authority Questionnaire (TAQ) for his PhD (which Toni supervised at RHUL) and this is a really good operational use of it.


The grant includes underpinning the cadet group so is for 1.2m. The evaluation part to Mdx is for £350K over the 2 years, split between Criminology and Psychology.

Friday 11 March 2016

Research Seminar: Prof. Raymond Klein (Dalhousie University, Canada)

***EVERYONE WELCOME, NO NEED TO BOOK***

Date: Thursday 31st March
Location: Town Hall Committee Room 3
Time: 12:00-13:00
Title: "Eye Movement Control and Covert Attention: Embodied or Disembodied Cognition?"

Raymond Klein is a cognitive psychologist whose research is dominated by the concept of attention. He considers himself a neo-Hebbian in the sense that he recognizes that the brain is the organ of mind, and values theories that seek to generate psychological processes in neural networks. In particular, he has recently become involved in applying the methods and findings of human experimental psychology to real world problems of individuals such as those suffering from dyslexia, attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Parkinson's disease, problem gambling, and brain damage because of stroke; and to real-world issues such as counterfeit detection, eyewitness testimony, road and offshore safety. Ray has kindly agreed to come along to Middlesex University and discuss his work on eye movement control and covert attention.

Biography:
With publications in Science, Nature, and Trends in Cognitive Science Professor Raymond Klein has an impressive research record. He has an h-index of 57 and has been cited over 15,000 times, over 6000 times since 2011 (Google scholar). He is on the editorial boards of several journals such as JEP:HPP, Can. JEP, and Attention Perc. & Psychophys. Ray helped Mel Goodale establish The Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS) and was its second President in 1993-4. In 2008 Ray was honoured to receive the society's highest academic honour, the D. O. Hebb Award and in 2012 was honoured to receive its Richard C. Tees Distinguished Leadership Award. In 2011 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has been at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia (Canada) since 1974.

http://www.dal.ca/faculty/science/psychology_neuroscience/faculty-staff/our-faculty/raymond-klein.html