Stage 2 Research Experience Scheme (RES)

About the RES
Staff Research Experience Interests
Frequently Asked Questions

About the RES

This academic session there will be some opportunities for Stage 2 students to join members of the School of Psychology and work on ongoing research projects. Students will be working together with a member of the School’s Research staff of their own choice, contingent upon availability of open places, and be involved in laboratory activities such as planning a study or conducting an experiment. The project is intended for students in or about to enter their second year and the time commitment is four hours per week throughout the course of one term. Unlike final year projects, the Research Experience Scheme will allow students to get involved in ongoing projects and to gain insight into state-of-the-art research. It is an excellent opportunity to become familiar with the life as a researcher, participate in day-to-day laboratory-activities (e.g. lab-meetings), have one-on-one meetings with the member of the department you are working with, discuss their research and, where agreed with the researcher, get a reference letter at the end of the project.

There is a limited number of places available and students are asked to directly file an application with the respective researcher in the School of Psychology. There is no compensation for participation in this scheme but, at the end of the project, all participating students will receive an official letter from the Head of School documenting their completion of the Research Experience Scheme. Participation in this scheme is for one term but can be renewed for as many terms as there is interest, as long as both sides agree.

Interested students are asked to consider the following steps:

Stage 2 students (i.e. students in or about to enter their second year) are eligible to participate.
You will identify a member of the School of your choice. The following staff are participating in the scheme, click on any of the links to see that person's research interests:
Contact the respective researcher of the School and see if he/she is accepting applications in the respective term (unless otherwise stated, place are for the current Autumn term).
Fill out the application form

Return your application to the researcher you want to work with. Deadlines for application for the academic year 2011-12 are:

Term	Deadline
Autumn Term	12:00, Friday 7 October 2011
Spring Term	12:00, Friday 27 January 2012

Typically, the research-candidate and the member of the School will get together and discuss the possibility of a project, in particular if there are more applications than there are position(s) that the departmental researcher offers. The program coordinator, Dr Ulrich Weger, will also be notified to keep a record of the students participating.
When the student/the supervisor wishes to discontinue participation in the scheme, he/she contacts the program coordinator who then will prepare a certificate of participation.
At the end of the respective term, the Head of the School of Psychology will issue the certificate, documenting the student’s involvement in the scheme. There will be no mark, however, the certificate will document the duration of participation, if requested by the student.
To determine the success of the program and to make it more attractive to future student generations, we will distribute an evaluation form that all participating students are asked to fill out and return to the program coordinator at the end of their project.

For general questions about the Research Experience Scheme you should refer to the Frequently Asked Questions section of this page and/or contact the Program coordinator, .

Staff Research Experience Interests

Dr Kirsten Abbot-Smith (8 Spring)

How do children learn to provide enough information for their conversation partner? - We have all experienced that frustrating situation when small children ask us to give them something but don't give us enough information to us to be able to decide exactly which one they want (e.g. Child: 'give me that one' Adult: which one? Child: the sheep! Adult: this sheep? Child: no, the other sheep! Adult: this sheep? Child: no, the sheep in the barn!). This study involves a picture book game in which 2- and 4-year-olds have to ask an adult for pictures to complete a story. Can they learn to provide enough information so that adults can give them the pictures they want? The children are tested in the developmental labs (of the Kent Child Development Unit) and students will be testing at the same time as a PhD student, Mrs. Rebecca Croll (as one adult helps the child complete the picture book and the other adult cannot see the picture but is the 'keeper' of stickers. Students will need to be willing to apply for an enhanced CRB through the University of Kent.

Professor Dominic Abrams (Up to 6 places over Autumn & Spring)

Effects of Ageism. Our research is central for the government's Department for Work and Pensions plans for an Ageing Society. We have been studying how people's attitudes and stereotypes about ageing affect their behaviour and performance. Currently we are exploring measures of performance and stereotype threat and also exploring differences between countries. The research spans data base and website management through to experimental testing (probably in Spring but possibly Autumn term too). Your experience in this project will involve working with myself, Melanie Vauclair, Chris Bratt and Hannah Swift. You will learn about questionnaire design and the processes involved in government research projects. We will also be conducting archival research (e.g. analysing objective evidence of behaviour from real world sources such as TV quiz shows etc.). This will be valuable experience for your future research project and for your CV. You will need to have a current CRB certificate
How people deal with non-conformity. This project explores how people deal with members of their groups who either want to resist group norms, to behave 'badly' or perhaps to innovate. Under my supervision, you may also be working with my other collaborators in this area, who include Georgina Randsley de Moura, and possibly Orkun Yetkili and Roger Giner Sorolla, who are collaborating with me on related research projects. The experience will include collecting data from students and members of organisations (e.g. sports clubs).
Children's responses to non-conformity. We are currently running a British Academy project which examines how children react to disloyal group members when there is a competition or in other situations. This research will include data coding, and data collection in schools (you will need to obtain a CRB certificate). You will be working with me, Adam Rutland and our research assistant on the project.
Children's reactions to ostracism. This project is idea for someone who wants to do a future project with school children, and will help you develop some computer based skills for experimentation. We are developing some software to test how children deal with being left out of a group. Under my supervision, you may also be working with my other collaborators in this area, who include Dave Langdale who was on placement at the Centre for the Study of Group Processes. You will need to have a current CRB certificate
Neighbourliness and Kindness. With the charity People United we are conducting a large scale survey of two towns in Kent to see how people perceive others in their town and what types of social relationships they have with them. This project will involve following the responses, helping with data entry and coding, and meeting with the team from People United. Under my supervision, you may also be working with my other collaborators in this area, who include Hazel Wardrop (one of our PhD students), Dave Langdale, and Tom Andrews (from People United). This project will give you useful experience for your project and also good connections and experience for your CV. You will need to have a current CRB certificate
Children's prosocial behaviour. When do children decide to help one another and why? This project is to run an experiment with primary school children. You will be the main experimenter so this is suitable for someone who already has a strong interest in developmental social psychology and experience working with children. This will also give you experience of running studies with children and will be valuable as a preparation for a final year project if you want to pursue that approach. You will need to have a current CRB certificate.

Dr Janet Briggs (2 places Spring)

Source monitoring. Source monitoring refers to the processes used to determine the source of remembered information. Source-monitoring failures are associated with memory errors, and have been implicated in unusual perceptual experiences such as hallucinations. The purpose of this project is to investigate some cognitive and personality characteristics associated with accurate source monitoring, using a laboratory study.

Professor Richard Crisp (3 places)

New Directions in Diversity Training. Across government, in industry and education, there is an increasing emphasis on the need for “diversity training”. But what makes for effective diversity training? Many current approaches are not based on sound scientific evidence, and we know relatively little about the psychological dynamics involved. This project will draw on recent research demonstrating that multicultural experiences can fundamentally change the way we process information about the world around us. We will explore whether some simple mental exercises can capture the essence of these cognitive changes, and if so, whether they can be harnessed in a new range of diversity training techniques. The project will develop these techniques, and test their potential to improve the quality of peoples’ judgment in a variety of domains including forensic cognition (jury decision making), behavioral economics (financial planning) and diversity science (reducing prejudice). If substantiated, the findings will suggest these new forms of diversity training can enhance innovative thinking, foster self-confidence and develop adaptive tendencies to embrace new and counter-normative ways of thinking - creative cognitions that could bring considerable benefits to individuals, organisations, and society at large.

Dr Roger Giner-Sorolla

Anger, Respect and Justice - Collect data in the UK in parallel to a similar study now going on in the United Arab Emirates; we are interested in how the different cultures justify their anger at a collective insult.
Replication Project - Conduct experimental or archival research supporting an international Open Science project working to investigate the bias against publishing replication studies in psychology.
Physiological and Facial Measures - CDedicated and responsible student wanted to learn about and carry out research on moral emotions (guilt, shame, anger, disgust) using measures of skin conductance, electromyography, and/or computerized interpretation of facial expression videos.
Apology Studies - Research on how apologies between and within groups are perceived, with special reference to the emotions involved.

Dr Malgorzata Goclowska

Group membership and creativity – As people become increasingly mobile, the change in how we think about group membership is a critical issue facing modern society. All around us, women become top politicians (e.g., Angela Merkel, the female chancellor of Germany), while mature individuals are encouraged to attend university. As international mobility increases, Poles work in Germany, Brits retire in Spain, and Russians (Andre Geim & Konstantin Novoselov) win a Nobel Prize working in the UK. From a psychological point of view, individuals like these go against stereotypic expectations about where they should live, or what they should be doing. Although defying norms in such ways may sometimes be controversial, it brings about novelty, and a challenges peoples' ideas about reality. Accumulating evidence shows that challenging stereotypic expectations decreases prejudice and increases flexible behaviours in people. This could also be of benefit to creativity and innovation. It is important to investigate this possibility, because (1) we need to know how people react to the increasing changes in group membership and (2) because the research could help us understand how to foster creativity and innovation.

Dr Tim Hopthrow (2 places)

Social dilemmas – Widespread societal concerns from environmental degradation, to restoration of the budget deficit, to over-population, serve as compelling reminders of the urgent need for research to find means to encourage individuals to sacrifice self-interest in favour or more cooperative, socially-responsible behaviour. The social dynamics underlying these pressing issues can be understood in terms of social dilemmas (Smithson & Foddy, 1999). A social dilemma characterises a situation where an individual has to make a choice between behaviour that benefits the collective, and behaviour that benefits the self (Baron & Kerr, 2003). The dilemma arises because individuals are always better off when they choose the personally-rewarding, non-cooperative choice. Yet if all individuals defect everyone will end up worse off than if they all choose the collectively rational, cooperative choice (Dawes, 1980). The current project aims to develop an entirely new and influential perspective to this paradigm, one that aims to promote more positive cooperative behaviour through mental simulation.

Professor Robert Johnston

Facial composites - Although there may be witnesses to crimes, these witnesses are usually unfamiliar with the suspects viewed and it is vital to obtain an effective description from them. A simple verbal description is often too vague to be helpful and so the police have made use of police artists and facial composite systems to try to capture a likeness of the suspect. However, police articts are scarce and early composite systems (e.g., Identikit) produced rather impoverished facial likenesses. The most modern systems allow the construction of very face like representations, but identifying suspected criminals from these representations is still less successful that we would wish. I have a number of projects looking at ways in which we can improve the likelihood of identifying criminals from facial composites. Part of these projects would involve you being taught to use the computerised software that create facial composites and learning to conduct a form of cognitive interview which can elicit good descriptions from witnesses.

Dr Georgina Randsley de Moura (5 places)

Deviance and Innovation – Autumn and/or Spring and/or Summer term to work on a project investigating the perception of deviance and innovation within groups. Involvement in the project will likely involve preparation of materials, data collection, and discussion of findings in relation to theoretical background.
Leadership – Autumn and/or Spring and/or Summer to work on a project about how people respond to different leaders - especially leaders who want to take the group in a new direction.
Experiences of Sexism - For the Spring term. To work with a team investigating how sexism is experienced depending on individuals' different circumstances and perceptions of the social world.

Dr Sophieke Russell (1 place)

Negative attitudes, emotions and blameFirst, a project will look at whether we should take into account emotions when deciding on ways to reduce negative attitudes. Second, another project will examine whether certain contextual factors are important when assigning blame, or if individuals will ignore these factors. These projects will be examined using online questionnaires and lab experiments.

Professor Adam Rutland (Up to 6 places in Spring term)

Children's attitudes and school norms - Research suggests children are concerned about self-presentation when expressing their explicit attitudes towards groups (e.g. ethnic prejudice). When children are made accountable to their ingroup or peer groups their attitudes typically change either becoming more positive to outgroup or more negative sometimes. What is the psychology behind this? Is it because children have a strong need to belong to the group and be accepted by the group so they conform to group norms? Your experience in this project will involve working with me and Luke McGuire. You will learn about interview design and the processes involved in collecting data in schools and entering or coding data. This will be valuable experience for your future research project and for your CV. You will need to have a current CRB certificate.
Bystanders and social exclusion amongst children - Children often witness social exclusion and bullying in schools since these types of incidents typically occur in a group context. However, children are often not willing to intervene as an assertive bystander to stop or report such incidents. Why is this? In this research we explore the role of age, social norms, status and intergroup contact in determining bystander interventions. Your experience in this project will involve working with me, Sally Palmer and Lindsey Cameron. You will learn about interview design and the processes involved in collecting data in schools and entering or coding data. This will be valuable experience for your future research project and for your CV. You will need to have a current CRB certificate.
Stigma and young children's friendships - Young pre-school children often don't like people who look different to them. For example, they are known to show less preference for individuals of a larger body-shape. This body shape bias is also known to result in children not liking other children who are friends with large body shaped children. This project will look at what is known as the 'mere proximity effect', and will investigate its development in early childhood. Your experience in this project will involve working with me and Luke McGuire. You will learn about interview design and the processes involved in collecting data in schools and entering or coding data. This will be valuable experience for your future research project and for your CV. You will need to have a current CRB certificate.
It's OK to criticise if you're in my group! The ingroup sensitivity effect in children - Research with adults shows that criticisms are received less defensively when made by an ingroup member rather than an outgroup member. We don't know when and why this phenomenon develops in children, though adult research suggests it is related to social identity development and notions of constructive criticism. This project will examine this question further. Your experience in this project will involve working with me and Luke McGuire. You will learn about interview design and the processes involved in collecting data in schools and entering or coding data. This will be valuable experience for your future research project and for your CV. You will need to have a current CRB certificate.

Dr Dinkar Sharma (1 place)

Controlling emotions - What influences our ability to pay attention to particular stimuli? Emotional stimuli are thought to automatically grab ones attention. In this project I am investigating whether our ability to pay attention to emotional stimuli is indeed automatic. The volunteer on this project will help me run and analyse reaction time experiments and thus gain training in experimental design and statistics.

Dr Dinkar Sharma & John Allen

The School of Psychology currently use the E-prime application suite to conduct a range of computerized experiments, for example stroop tests and experiments involving the presentation of stimuli and capturing of participant responses. PsychoPy is an open-source (& hence free) package for running experiments involving the presentation of stimuli and collection of data and is advertsised as being suitable for a wide range of psychology, neuroscience and psychophysics experiments. PsychoPy is becoming increasingly popular across the research community, not only because it is free, (whereas E-prime is a commercial system with not insignificant licence costs, as are other alternatives) but also because it is based on the highly respected and robust object orientated language, Python and is thus very robust and powerful.

Comparison of E-Prime and PsychoPy - The Psychology Technical team, in conjunction with Dr Dinkar Sharma would like to carry out a detailed investigation of PsychoPy to compare it with E-prime and to consider its possible suitability for use within the School of Psychology at Kent. We would like an RES student to help drive this investigation by conducting a number of 'identical' experiments in both E-prime and PsychoPy and to analyse and compare the results from both systems. Additional factors for consideration will be, user-friendliness of the development environment; timing precision of displaying stimuli and capturing responses; functionality, in particular regarding the type of stimuli that can be used and the control the programmer has over their display; data output format and usability and interface capabilities to other devices (eg response boxes) and other systems (e.g. eeg and eye tracking systems) Whilst, initially at least it is expected that the programs will be developed by the technical team, it is hoped that as well as conducting all the experiments there will be some scope for the student to express a personal preference as to whether they get involved in some additional programming (e-prime and/or PsychoPy), or to focus on the statistical analysis and final report.

Dr Joachim Stoeber (4 places Spring)

Perfectionism is a fascinating personality characteristic because it has two very different sides: On the one hand, perfectionism can motivate people to give their best and achieve higher performance. On the other hand, perfectionism can make people miserable because, whatever they do, they are never satisfied. In the spring term, I have two research projects on perfectionism where two students each can each assist me:

Perfectionism and reactions to success and failure (2 places Spring). This project investigates how perfectionism affects people's reactions to success and failure: how they feel after success and failure, and whom they blame for their success and failure—themselves or others?
Cross-cultural perceptions of perfectionism (2 places Spring). This project investigates cross-cultural differences in people's perceptions of perfectionism comparing White British students and Chinese students. To what degree is perfectionism perceived as a stable personality trait versus a changeable characteristic in Eastern and Western cultures?

Dr Mario Weick (3-4 places Spring & Autumn)

Power, Cognition & Behaviour. Many years ago, David Kipnis became famous for asserting that 'power corrupts'. Power undoubtedly transforms people. The nature of this transformation is, however, not as straightforward as Kipnis might have thought. Power affects human cognition and behaviour in fascinating and often contrasting ways. These effects can be observed in the social realm (e.g., interactions; social influence), at the perceptual level (e.g., attention; vision), down to the neurophysiological level (e.g., hemispheric activation). Participants in the research experience scheme will be involved in research projects that combine social and cognitive psychology to examine the question of how lacking or possessing power and control affects people. You will get firsthand experience in the planning and the running of laboratory experiments using a range of behavioural measures and state-of-the art equipment (questionnaires; reaction time paradigms; touch screen; eye-tracker). Some projects may also involve physiological measures (cardiovascular reactivity; EMG).

Frequently Asked Questions

Here is an interview with Dr Ulrich Weger about further details of the scheme:

Question: Why would a student want to take part in this new research experience scheme?

UW: Different people will find this scheme attractive for different reasons. People who would like to get hands-on insights into ongoing research projects will find this a welcome opportunity. Those who seek to work on their methodological, analytic or literature-review skills will benefit from a strategic approach in dealing with a particular question. Others who consider doing a Masters or a PhD may use this scheme as a testing ground to investigate their own motivation, interests and strengths. Yet others may still be uncertain about the specific direction they want to pursue and for those this scheme may be an opportunity to sharpen their interests and benefit from discussions with others who may have experience with similar questions.

Question: Why is this for Year 2 students only?

UW: The second year is the best time to dive into a research area of one’s own choice. From their first year people already have a general sense of what the different sub-fields within psychology are about and I think such a background is necessary to make an informed decision about what type of research someone would like to find out about more; yet, there is still sufficient flexibility and students are not occupied with their final year project.

Question: What is the difference between this scheme and the final year project?

UW: The principal motivation behind the final year project is to carry out a project from beginning to end and to experience what it means to develop a question and then pursue it. The new research experience scheme, by contrast, will involve students into a routine research agenda that is already in full progress. The project does not start from scratch so to speak – the student enters into a boat that is already in the middle of the stream and can thus benefit from the momentum that is already there.

Question: Why is this scheme for one term only? Isn’t that a bit short to carry out a reasonable project?

UW: The idea is that students can continue as long as they want to, given that they agree on this with the respective supervisor. It does not require much effort to simply renew participation for another term – in fact any extension is really only an agreement between the student and the supervisor. On the other hand it would be difficult to have a situation where people feel they have to carry on into another term if they don’t really like it. Making it a one-term project seems to be the best solution, if people like it enough to continue – that’s between them and their supervisor.

Question: Who do you think should apply?

UW: Anybody who has the necessary interest and knowledge in the subject area and the necessary time to complete the work should apply. These people should then discuss their fits with the needs of the project with their potential supervisor.

Question: Can one apply to more than one supervisor?

UW: One can apply to more than one supervisor but one can only work on one project at a time.

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