An introduction to Chris Woodrow

I joined Middlesex in July 2013 as a lecturer, and I will be teaching on PSY3018 Business Psychology and PSY4117 Applied Business Psychology. My academic background is in organizational and health psychology, and I am interested in applications of psychological theory to people at work, particularly where this relates to healthcare provision.

After a first degree in Psychology and an MSc in Health Psychology I took up a health services research post, joining a Cancer Research UK funded group at the University of Oxford. My focus was on informed decision making about whether to have screening for cancer, and I researched and wrote some of the information materials about screening that are sent to patients and doctors by the NHS.

Not being able to avoid the inevitable pull of London, I then moved to KCL to work in an NIHR funded research group looking at safety and quality in the NHS. My job was to examine ways in which workforce issues might affect patients, which involved looking at various human resources issues such as harassment amongst staff. I also did a part time PhD in organizational psychology at KCL, a mixed methods longitudinal study examining how joining a new organization can affect the well-being of hospital employees and their patients.

I am currently writing up various bits of research. I am finalising a paper looking at the ways in which managers and supervisors respond (or don’t!) to bullying and harassment at work. I also have an interesting piece ongoing about the “psychological contract”, which is basically the perceived / implicit (rather than formal written) employment contract held by employees.

I’d be delighted to hear from anyone who might like to collaborate on anything. I am broadly interested in applications of psychology to organizations and to healthcare (ideally but not necessarily at the same time) and I have experience with mixed methods and longitudinal research designs.

My contact details are: room TG65, extension 15009, email c.woodrow@mdx.ac.uk.

Chris Woodrow

An introduction to Antonia Bifulco, our new Head of Department

Antonia Bifulco – Professor of Lifespan Psychology and Head of Department.

a.bifulco@mdx.ac.uk  (room TG34; tel 0208 411 3705)

I joined the Psychology Department in July 2013, having been at Kingston University for the last 2 years, and before that at Royal Holloway for most of my career. I have also brought my research team – Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies (CATS) which I co-direct with Prof Julia Davidson from Criminology. The Centre is multidisciplinary in its focus on victims and perpetrators of abuse and aims to engage in both academic and applied research with relevant services. We currently have projects involving youth violence, young people in residential care and cyberbullying as well as conducting CPD training for practitioners in health and social care in standardised assessments on childhood neglect/abuse, attachment style and parenting. We have recently completed an EU study of online grooming for sexual abuse, and working with a child protection team on improving case assessment and analysis. My interest in Lifespan Psychology in relation to vulnerability and clinical disorder is around childhood and adolescent experience as a primer for later risk and disorder as well as intergenerational transmission of risk from parent to offspring. My interests combine both Health and Forensic domains.

I have a new 3-year ESRC project grant beginning in November called: ‘Stress online: Developing a reliable and valid interactive online method for measuring stressful life events and difficulties’. This is held with partners at the Institute of Psychiatry (KCL) and Goldsmiths. It aims to mimic a face-to-face contextualised interview online, testing this with existing samples with depression, physical illness and controls, as well as in a first year student group. The aim is to validate the new interview alongside the in-person interview and then to examine the relationship of stressful events and difficulties to depression and physical illness and to drop-out or poor exam results in students.

I am very pleased to be taking on a head of department role for this vibrant and talented staff group! I look forward to a productive year of work and the department’s success in both teaching and research programmes.

An introduction to Yaél Ilan-Clarke

I am a researcher working in the Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies (CATS) which is a new research centre at Middlesex combining Psychology and Criminology areas of interest. As a group, we are engaged in research, training and application to practice on issues of trauma and abuse, spanning events occurring both in everyday lives and on digital platforms.

I have been involved in a diverse array of projects since beginning working with the research group in 2008, with a focus on understanding issues of attachment throughout the lifespan and the measurement of abuse. My own background is Health Psychology (MSc at UCL) and I try to apply the skills and expertise derived from that field to the various projects in CATS.

Currently I am leading on an evaluation of an innovative hospital-based youth violence intervention at St. Thomas’ A&E department. It is an exciting and challenging opportunity to apply theoretical principles to such a ‘real-life’ project, something which rarely runs smoothly. However, the positive results from the first 3 years are encouraging and motivate me to continue to refine our methods of measurement and increase our understanding of conducting research in complex environments such as this. With it being an ‘action research’ project, we work both inductively and deductively, which makes for very dynamic and interesting work. We use both qualitative and quantitative measures, which give us a more in-depth understanding of the true meaning of the effects of the work being done. Ultimately it’s good to be part of a project working to improve outcomes for young people experiencing violence.

I am also interested in various other topics, particularly within health psychology, and would welcome an opportunity to collaborate on work in that field, particularly reproductive health psychology of which I am aware there is much expertise in this department.

Being a member of CATS I am based in the Williams Building G001. As I work part time I am best contactable through email Y.Ilan-Clarke@mdx.ac.uk or phone #16606. I welcome any opportunity for discussion, collaboration or generally just forming connections with fellow psychologists.

Yaél Ilan-Clarke

Research Club 2013-14

The first meeting of research club this academic year is on Wednesday 2 October 2013 from noon in HG03.

An introduction to Alexander Jones

I moved to London in 2001 (from Sweden) to do an undergrad at City University London and then continued with an MSc at UCL. Broadly, my research interests include attention, prediction, action, and multisensory integration, and using cognitive neuroscience techniques to investigate how brain and behaviour relate. In particular, I use electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERPs) to try and tap into what is going on in the brain.

I did my PhD at City University London looking at how we attend to touch, an area which has seen very little research as compared to vision and audition. Our sense of touch is constantly bombarded with information from our body (our clothes, the chair we sit on etc.) so how do we select what is relevant? Moreover, how does voluntary (endogenous) and reflexive (exogenous) attention interact, so... do we notice the “tap on the shoulder” when we are really focused on something else?

After my PhD I moved to Paris to do a post-doc at Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Universite Paris Descartes. Here my research was more focused on action prediction. How do we process the effects of our actions? The most well known example of the motor system predicting what will happen next is that you can’t tickle yourself (sensory suppression)! As with many colleagues, a range of topics interest me and I am currently involved in various projects such as investigating how professional ballet dancers view the aesthetics of movements, or in another project we are looking at how Mindfulness therapy can change attention and body processing in the brain. I am also keen to explore areas such as attention to pain, or the neural correlates of sports expertise, for example looking at action anticipation and attention. It is not always the strongest and fastest athlete who is best, but arguably the most important factor determining success is the brain, but why?

I’m in room TG68 so just drop by for a chat or email me at a.j.jones@mdx.ac.uk (ext. is 16328)

Alexander Jones

An introduction to Emma Ward

I joined the department in early September, and prior to this I worked as a Teaching Fellow at the University of York (2012-2013). Before that I was working on my PhD at UCL (so it’s great to be back in London!). 

I am interested in human memory, particularly the distinction between explicit (e.g., recall, recognition) and implicit (e.g., repetition priming) forms of memory. The traditional view is that they are driven by separate cognitive and neural systems, but the work of my collaborators and I challenges this view. For example, there have been many demonstrations that explicit and implicit memory are differentially affected by various factors, such as ageing. Some have argued that explicit memory declines with age while implicit memory remains stable, but using a modern and robust measurement technique, we find that both forms of memory decline with age. It may not therefore be necessary to make a distinction between explicit and implicit memory systems. 

I am currently working on a project with Chris Berry at Plymouth University (who I got to know when he was a Research Fellow and I was a PhD student at UCL) examining the effects of study duration on explicit and implicit memory. A compelling finding is that although long study durations benefit recognition to a greater extent than short study durations (as one might predict), the opposite is true of priming. I am really interested in this effect as the double dissociation is difficult to interpret within the single-system framework. We are nearing completion of a series of experiments in which we’re trying to get to the bottom of things.

I am very broadly interested in memory retrieval, and factors that affect this, such as attention and context. I am about to put in a bid for a small grant with Marie Poirier at City University investigating the benefit of context reinstatement to memory in ageing. We know that reinstating encoding context facilitates memory retrieval in elderly individuals (e.g., studying an item on a particular background scene is more likely to be remembered later if it is again paired with the same relative to a different scene), but because older individuals have known deficits in building associations between separate pieces of information, it is unclear how the effect operates. Some have argued that the associations are implicit, and we plan to investigate this.

I very much look forward to getting to know all of you and hearing more about your research (and other!) interests. 

You can find me in TG68, email me on e.ward@mdx.ac.uk, or call me on ext. 16329

Emma Ward

An introduction to Andrea Oskis

All of the new staff have been asked to introduce themselves to the department, and wider readership, through this blog.

Here is the first:

All of my research is driven by the common aim of investigating how our interpersonal bonds impact our psychological and physical well-being, especially earlier on in the lifespan. My studies span the areas of Health Psychology, Clinical Psychology and Psychophysiology. In the main, my research has examined attachment style in relation to objective, physiological markers of well-being, and most of my work has involved the classic 'stress' hormone cortisol. Given that cortisol can be measured easily and non-invasively in saliva, this has probably contributed to me being known as the 'spit lecturer' in my previous posts. My new and exciting project still involves saliva, but this time the 'bonding' hormone, oxytocin, and examining this in relation to attachment, love and other aspects of interpersonal behaviour. I am carrying out this work with the Psychophysiology and Stress Research Group at the University of Westminster.

Since I love to talk to people about their relationships, I need a research tool that allows me to do this within a scientific setting! I have developed my expertise in interview assessments of attachment style and parenting via my association with the Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies. I work with this group in an applied capacity as accredited trainer for the Attachment Style Interview. This work has served to be a springboard for me to develop my consultancy services to support those who work in healthcare settings, where these the measurement of attachment style is increasingly forming part of the assessment procedure. 

As well as talking to people and using interesting research tools, I also enjoy drumming up enthusiasm to study Psychology at university. So I am really excited to speak at this year's BPS ‘Psychology 4 Students’ event in London.  

Come and visit me in TG40, call me on extension 3107 or email me on A.Oskis@mdx.ac.uk. 

Andrea Oskis