Postgraduate

If you have passion and focus / You can achieve anything


Forensic Psychology MSc

This is a taught programme within the Psychology subject area.

Apply online

Key facts

Outline

The MSc in Forensic Psychology aims to satisfy the academic component of professional training in forensic psychology (that is, to become a Chartered Forensic Psychologist). Throughout the course, you attend non-assessed seminars and go on site visits. The MSc in Forensic Psychology is accredited by the British Psychological Society.

Programme structure

These programmes run for one year full-time or two years part-time. They involve lecture-, workshopand seminar-based teaching, as well as an individually supervised empirical research project. The option modules listed are not exhaustive, as new modules may be approved or opened to students by the start of the academic year.

Course content

  • Advanced Statistics and Methodology (40 credits)
  • Assessment and Treatment of Offenders in Forensic Settings (20 credits)
  • Forensic Cognition: Theory, Research and Practice (20 credits)
  • Psychology of Criminal Conduct (20 credits)
  • Psychology of Law and Justice (20 credits)
  • Forensic Psychology Empirical Research Project (60 credits)

For further information see the School site.

Assessment

Advanced Statistics and Methodology is assessed by examination. All other taught modules are assessed by written work and presentations. Research is assessed by two articles: one empirical paper and one review article on your chosen topic.

Funding

Every school at Kent offers one or two University postgraduate research scholarships, each available for three years, providing fees at the home/EU rate and a stipend up to £13,590 per annum (2011/12 rate).

Many schools offer scholarships in the form of Graduate Teaching Assistantships (GTAs) whereby postgraduate research students receive financial support in return for teaching. The value of awards may vary, but often cover tuition fees at the home/EU rate and a substantial maintenance grant.

All postgraduate research students are eligible to apply for GTAs. See Graduate Teaching Assistantships.

We also encourage applicants for ESRC awards, which may cover Masters' as well as PhD funding.

For further information about sources of financial support for postgraduate students, see Postgraduate funding.

Further information:

Resources and facilities

The School has excellent facilities for both laboratory and field research, including advanced laboratory and teaching facilities. Resources include:

  • three fully equipped colour video laboratories for face-to-face group research, together with ten satellite laboratories connected via remote-control CCTV and two-way audio links
  • 58 research laboratories, all containing networked computers
  • a further 80 PCs available exclusively to Psychology students, including a designated MSc computer-networked room providing full email and internet access
  • shared offices and a personal, networked computer for research students
  • a full range of computer-based experiment generators and productivity software installed on all the School's systems.

We have invested heavily in improving our research facilities. These include:

  • an upgraded laboratory suite with equipment for digital sound and vision recording
  • a suite equipped with two EEG/ERP (event-related brain potential) systems, a sophisticated means of measuring brain activity while participants perform cognitive tasks; five eye-tracking systems; and fully sound-proofed cubicles equipped for language-based research
  • a suite equipped with Bio-Pac recorders to allow for a range of physiological measures to be taken during stressful and other tasks
  • specialist laboratories equipped for face processing and vision research
  • a virtual reality laboratory
  • a social cognition laboratory
  • creation in 2010 of the Kent Child Development Unit and research team focusing on how children learn about their world, about other people and about the language they hear around them.

Further information:

Research groups

Research is focused within four core collaborative, thematic groupings, Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Forensic Psychology and Developmental Psychology. It also includes four formally constituted research centres, representing areas of concentration and excellence in research.

The research environment is designed to sustain a strong, vibrant research culture, encourage collaboration, and unite staff and students with shared research interests. Our themes ensure critical mass and create a highly energetic and stimulating intellectual climate.

Research activity is supported by:

  • centrally co-ordinated provision and use of laboratories and technical support
  • selection of speakers for our weekly departmental research colloquia
  • weekly research meetings within each theme to develop, report and analyse research, and host our many visiting scholars
  • several monthly small meeting series on specific areas of cross-cutting research (such as forensic, social development, emotion, social cognition and health).

Social Psychology

The Social Psychology research team contains 18 academic researchers, two internal and five international affiliates. Much of our social psychology research is co-ordinated through the Centre for the Study of Group Processes (CSGP), the largest research group in this area in Europe. The Centre attracts a stream of major international social psychology researchers, who visit the Centre regularly to work with our staff and are officially affiliated to the Centre. The Social Psychology group also includes chief editors of the journals Anxiety, Stress, and Coping (Stoeber), and Group Processes and Intergroup Relations (Abrams) and senior editors of other major academic journals in Social Psychology (Crisp: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Douglas: European Journal of Social Psychology). Social psychology research at Kent is funded by a variety of British and international sources, currently and recently including ESRC, British Academy, Leverhulme, Age Concern, European Commission, European Science Foundation, Home Office, Equality and Human Rights Commission, Nuffield, and Joseph Rowntree Foundation, as well as government departments such as the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Department for Work and Pensions.


The Social Psychology group includes the following themes:
Prejudice, intergroup contact and social categorisation
This research is carried out in our social psychology laboratories, at schools and in business organisations. For example, research within this topic focuses on questions such as: how contact between members of different social groups is represented psychologically, how intergroup contact affects prejudice, when out-groups are seen as less human, when and why children show prejudice, and why organisational mergers sometimes fail.
Social inequality and cohesion
Research on this topic combines theory-driven research and engagement with policy. It is conducted in real-life settings such as the
workplace, and involves national and international surveys. For example, the research focuses on the well-being of the elderly in Britain, work participation and motherhood, and discrimination against different groups in society.
Group dynamics and social influence
Laboratory studies and community-based research are conducted on this topic. For example, research focuses on co-operation in small groups, group decision making, perception and influence of leaders, social communication and language, subjective group dynamics in adults and children, the dynamics of prison gang activity, and the impact of alcohol on group processes.
Personality and social motivation
Much of this research is carried out in laboratories, through surveys and in clinical or other applied settings. For example, research has examined aggression, the adaptive functions of perfectionism, and consequences of mortality salience.

Social Psychology staff

Professor Dominic Abrams, Dr Lindsey Cameron, Professor Richard Crisp, Dr Karen Douglas, Dr Mike Forrester, Dr Roger Giner-Sorolla, Dr Tim Hopthrow, Professor Diane Houston, Dr Afroditi Pina, Dr Georgina Randsley de Moura, Professor Adam Rutland, Dr Joachim Stoeber, Dr Robbie Sutton, Dr Eduardo Vasquez, Dr Tendayi Viki, Dr Mario Weick, Dr Arnaud Wisman, Dr Jane Wood.

Cognitive Psychology

Research under this theme has an international reputation in the topic areas of Visual Cognition and Attention and Language and Communication. Some of this research activity occurs in the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems, a strategic partnership between the Schools of Psychology and Computing.

Visual Cognition and Attention

Research on this topic focuses primarily on the role of vision and visual perception in human performance. The fundamental aim of this work is to identify the cognitive processes and neurological mechanisms underlying various visual tasks. Studies involving neurologically healthy volunteers examine issues such as face recognition and identification, eyewitness testimony, person detection, emotion processing and pattern and motion recognition. This research also examines a range of psychological disorders, including unilateral visual neglect, addiction, dementia and persistent vegetative state. Researchers are interested in examining the cognitive nature of these disorders, including assessing attentional biases, visual experiences and neurological activity. Much of this work also has an applied motivation, for example using transcranial direct current stimulation to alleviate deficits in neurological patients.

Language and Communication

Research in this group examines various aspects of semantic, pragmatic and syntactic understanding. Research questions on healthy populations include the role of executive functions in successful language use and communication, how language influences attentional processes and perspective taking, anomaly detection, and the effect of interruptions on reading. Work on developmental populations examines issues such as how children learn to understand and produce sentences in their own language, and how they learn conversational conventions and self-repair. Research in this group also examines developmental disorders of communication, including Autism Spectrum disorders and dyslexia. This research group has links with researchers in the School of European Culture and Languages, as part of the Centre for Language and Linguistic Studies.

Cognitive Psychology Staff

Dr Kirsten Abbot-Smith, Dr Markus Bindemann, Dr Heather Ferguson, Professor Robert Johnston, Dr Erika Nurmsoo, Dr Dinkar Sharma, Dr Ulrich Weger, Dr David Wilkinson.

Developmental Psychology

Staff involved in research focused on specific stages of the lifespan include Professor Dominic Abrams, Professor Adam Rutland, Dr Kirsten Abbott-Smith, Dr Lindsey Cameron, Dr Mike Forrester, Dr Erika Nurmsoo and Dr Jane Wood. The main population of interest is children, from infancy to adolescence. Research topics in social psychology include the expression and control of ethnic and gender prejudice, social ostracism and inclusion, conversational norms and group identity in children. Our cognitive developmental research includes such topics as theory of mind, language development and children's information processing. Forensic research on children is focused on adolescents, in particular gang activity and antisocial behaviour. Lifespan research at Kent also includes research on social aspects of older adulthood, in particular self-stereotyping and prejudice against the elderly.

Forensic Psychology

Forensic Psychology research at Kent and all forensic-related teaching operates through our newly constituted Centre of Research and Education in Forensic Psychology (CORE-FP). Current research is focused on bullying in prisons, prison gang behaviour, jury decision-making, child sexual offending, rape, rape proclivity, female sexual offending, theories of offender rehabilitation, fire-setting, sexual harassment, violence, aggression and alcohol, and the infra-humanisation of offenders. Other areas of research include social cognition, social and moral emotion, and group process theory, all of which are applied to the study of offending behaviour or court process issues. Forensic psychology research at Kent is funded by various national and international sources, which include: The British Academy, Economic and Social Research Council, Home Office, Leverhulme, Ministry of Justice and The Nuffield Foundation. Research may be carried out with staff or offenders/ex- ffenders in a variety of settings, including prisons, youth offending institutions, secure mental health units and probation offices. Examples of student work in these settings include: evaluations of offender resettlement projects in the community, examination of the formation of prison/street gangs, investigations into the offence styles of arsonists and female sexual offenders, and an examination of the association between personality disorder and neurocognitive deficits in mentally disordered offenders. Alternatively, research may take place with students or members of the community in our newly equipped laboratories. Examples include: an examination of how highly rape prone male students interact with being teased by a female confederate, the effects of alcohol on aggression and the effects of group processes on jury decision-making.

Forensic Psychology staff

The forensic psychology team is made up of seven academic researchers, five internal and eight national/international affiliates. Many of the team and affiliates are registered as Chartered Forensic Psychologists with the Health Professionals Council and work regularly with offenders and ex-offenders. The seven full-time forensic academics at Kent are: Dr Emma Alleyne, Dr Theresa Gannon, Dr Caoilte Ó Ciardha, Dr Afroditi Pina, Dr Eduardo Vasquez, Dr Tendayi Viki, Dr Jane Wood. Our staff members are leading international academics and experts within their field who have edited and authored leading textbooks, chapters and journal articles associated with innovative research that feeds into postgraduate taught courses as well as postgraduate research. Kent forensic staff members also appear regularly via national newspapers, radio and television to make commentary on key cases or issues in forensic psychology.

Centre for the Study of Group Processes

The Centre for the Study of Group Processes (CSGP) was set up in 1990 to consolidate the School's excellent international reputation for social psychological research into group processes and intergroup relations. The Centre is now a thriving international research community, including 14 full-time academic staff and a large number of research fellows and PhD students. The Centre also attracts a stream of major international group researchers, who visit the Centre regularly to work with our staff and are officially affiliated to the Centre. The Centre also edits an international journal, Group Processes and Intergroup Relations.

Centre for Research on Social Climate

The Centre for Research on Social Climate was set up in June 2009 to investigate how social conventions frame and constrain human behaviour. Such conventions are universal in daily life and they are anchored in a given social climate – the collection of opinions, experiences and values at a given time and in a given context. The Centre seeks to investigate how these conventions and metaphors influence our view of the human being and inform and shape people's behaviour, and also how they influence scientific methodology in areas such as consciousness and intentionality.

Centre of Research and Education in Forensic Psychology

The main aim of the Centre of Research and Education in Forensic Psychology is to conduct high-impact psychological research to (1) further understand key forensic issues of social significance, and (2) lead to cutting-edge teaching and research opportunities for postgraduate students. Forensic psychology is an extremely popular and rapidly developing branch of psychology that seeks to understand the psychological processes underlying offending behaviour (including group processes), the reduction and supervision of offending behaviour (ie, rehabilitation, treatment and management of community risk), victim responses to offending, the mechanisms underlying the criminal justice system more generally (ie, jury decision making and the courts), and attitudes to offenders and offender reintegration in society.

Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems

The objective of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems (CCNCS) is to harness the potential for cross-disciplinary research at the junction of cognitive psychology and the computational sciences. The Centre focuses on how behavioural and neuro-physiological experimentation needs to inform and be informed by the construction of computational models. Furthermore, the results of such studies should inform the construction of artificial systems, such as forensic imaging, human-computer interfaces and robotic systems.

Show all

|

Hide all

Staff research

Dr Kirsten Abbot-Smith:Lecturer in Psychology
Child language development and its intersection with how children perceive events.

Professor Dominic Abrams: Professor of Social Psychology
Social identity and intergroup relations; prejudice; sexism; deviance; social identity in organisational contexts; group consensus processes; the self-concept and self-regulation of behaviour.

Dr Markus Bindermann: Lecturer in Psychology
Face and person perception; detection of people in natural setings; person memory and eyewitness identification; perception of eye-gaze and emotion from faces and other aspects of social cognition.

Dr Lindsey Cameron: Lecturer in Psychology
Social developmental psychology: development and reduction of intergroup prejudice in children; direct intergroup contact and extended intergroup contact; development of ethnic and national identity in children and adolescents; acculturation in childhood; experience of prejudice and discrimination, and its consequences for social development.

Professor Richard Crisp: Professor of Psychology
The psychology of multiple social categorisation, and in particular whether it has benefits for individuals, intergroup relations, and social systems more generally.

Dr Karen Douglas: Reader in Psychology
Understanding beliefs in conspiracy theories, language and stereotyping, sexist language, lay theories of persuasion, social psychology of the internet, interpersonal and intergroup communication.

Dr Heather Ferguson: Lecturer in Psychology
The interface between cognitive processes and social interaction, and specifically the way people access and represent other people's perspectives during communication.

Dr Mike Forrester: Reader in Psychology
Child development and children's conversational skills; discourse and conversation analysis; psychoanalytic developmental psychology.

Dr Theresa Gannon: Reader in Forensic Psychology
The cognition of child molesters, rapists, and violent offenders; detecting fake-good responses in prison populations; the rehabilitation and treatment of sexual offenders; applied cognitive-experimental psychology; the characteristics and treatment of female sexual offenders and fire-setters.

Dr Roger Giner-Sorolla: Reader in Psychology
The role of emotions in prejudice and self-control; moral judgements and emotion (anger, disgust, guilt, and shame); cross-cultural differences in moral beliefs; the role of emotions in automatically activated attitudes; the speed of activation of emotionally charged attitudes and memories; the ability of introspection to modify emotions.

Dr Tim Hopthrow: Lecturer in Psychology
Small group performance and decision-making especially in the context of co-operative behaviour in social dilemmas; the effects of alcohol consumption on group performance.

Professor Diane Houston: Professor of Psychology
Applied social psychology and its interface with sociology and social policy; theoretical approaches to women's work participation, occupational segregation and career development; processes of discrimination, particularly sexism; the ways in which different policy contexts shape gender equality and gender stereotyping; work-life balance and career consequences of flexible working.

Professor Robert Johnston: Professor of Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive processes underlying face and object processing, eg accessing and representing information about familiar people; recognising other-race faces; understanding how unfamiliar faces become familiar; determining how age-ofacquisition influences object identification.

Dr Erika Nurmsoo: Lecturer in Psychology
Language acquisition, focusing on word learning; theory of mind development; source monitoring and use of testimony in preschoolers; children's comprehension of partial and ambiguous input; understanding and use of symbols, drawing, and pretence.

Dr Afroditi Pina: Lecturer in Psychology
Sexual violence, gender equality and victimisation, in particular rape and the myths that surround it; sexual harassment, its impact on its victims, women's coping strategies, and the link between sexual harassment and the emotions of anger and fear.

Dr Georgina Randsley de Moura: Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology
Leadership; deviance; collective protest; political and organisational group processes; subjective group dynamics.

Professor Adam Rutland: Professor of Developmental Psychology
The development and self-presentation of childhood prejudice; children's implicit and explicit racial and national attitudes; extended intergroup contact and the reduction of childhood prejudice; the development of ethnic identity, acculturation orientation and psychological well-being among immigrant children; the development of subjective group dynamics (person-focused intergroup bias); self-categorisation and stereotyping among adults.

Dr Dinkar Sharma: Senior Lecturer in Psychology
Cognition and emotion; selective attention; priming; cognitive approaches to addiction.

Dr Joachim Stoeber: Reader in Psychology
Perfectionism, well-being, and performance; coping; personal goals in adolescence; stress and health in the workplace; motivation; personality and individual differences.

Dr Robbie Sutton: Reader in Psychology
Just-world beliefs and system-justification; social norms and communication processes especially as they relate to prejudice, stereotyping, and the perpetuation of injustice and inequality; the inner logic of apparently irrational behaviours such as mutually destructive conflicts and environmental despoilation; implications of these processes for gender (sexism, fear of crime, and views of rape complainants) and global warming (climate change).

Dr Eduardo Vasquez: Lecturer in Forensic Psychology
Aggression and displaced aggression; anger, rumination, and aggression and violent behaviours; inter-group relations; personalisation, self-disclosure and liking; inter-group conflict and aggression; intergang violence; alcohol and social behaviours: alcohol and aggression, alcohol and inter-group anxiety; applications to criminal behaviour.

Dr Tendayi Viki: Senior Lecturer in Forensic Psychology
Intra- and intergroup dynamics; mergers and acquisitions, psychology and the workplace; infrahumanisation; police psychology; methodology and statistics.

Dr Ulrich Weger: Senior Lecturer in Psychology
Visual cognition; eye movements and attentional processes during reading; emotional capture of attention; voluntary and involuntary control of attention; individual differences in attention and memory; research methods in psychology.

Dr Mario Weick: Lecturer in Psychology

The impact of social and situational factors on people's perceptions; judgements and actions; the role of power and control - specifically how powerful and powerless people differ in their perceptions, the way they make judgements and their actions.

Dr David Wilkinson: Lecturer in Psychology
Visual cognition; perceptual and attentional performance in healthy and brain-damaged individuals; the use of sensory stimulation to rehabilitate stroke.

Dr Arnaud Wisman: Lecturer in Psychology
Coping mortality salience; terror management theory; the self-concept, affect-regulation and implicit regulation; defensiveness versus openness; growth; evolutionary social psychology; groups, conformism and cultural worldviews.

Dr Jane Wood: Senior Lecturer in Forensic Psychology
Street and prison gang formation and activity; public attitudes to crime and punishment, bullying in prison and schools; resettlement and rehabilitation of ex-offenders and the role of emotions in judging offenders.

Further information:

Contact details

Admissions enquiries

T: +44 (0)1227 827272
E: information@kent.ac.uk

Subject enquiries

Carly Turnham,
School of Psychology, Keynes College,
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NP, UK
T: +44 (0)1227 824775
F: +44 (0)1227 827030
E: psych-gen@kent.ac.uk

International Pre-Master's (GDip) enquiries

Centre for English and World Languages
T: +44 (0)1227 824069
E: premasters@kent.ac.uk
W: www.kent.ac.uk/cewl/courses/GraduateDiplomas

Further information:

Publishing Office - © University of Kent

The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T: +44 (0)1227 764000

Last Updated: 13/09/2011