Research Experience Course Supervisors

The School of Psychology offers two formal research experience courses to psychology students in the first three years of the psychology sequence.

PSYC2991 Research Experience I
PSYC2992 Research Experience II

These courses provide an opportunity for students to gain experience in a research laboratory in the School of Psychology. Students will participate in the day to day running of a research laboratory, which may involve attending lab meetings, assisting with conducting research, and conducting literature searches (five hours per week). You will complete assessment tasks that may include a Reflective Laboratory Report and Participation.

Important: If you plan to enrol in one of these courses, please be aware that they are #1 unit courses, and so to be able to complete the psychology sequence, you must complete both courses (making up #2 units) or one of these courses and the #1 unit PSYC3241 Individual Studies course.

You can enrol in either of the research experience courses in any semester of study, including summer semester. You can also enrol in the two courses concurrently.

Also important: Enrolment is by permission only. Please consult the following list of potential supervisors prior to seeking the agreement of an academic to supervise you. You must then contact the Deputy Head of School (Teaching and Learning) indicating which academic has agreed to supervise your research experience and seek permission to enrol.

Potential Supervisors

Professor Ottmar V. Lipp

Room:

MC-420a

Phone:

3365 6385

Email:

o.lipp@psy.uq.edu.au

I have three mayor research interests (most likely too many for my own good). They share the common theme of ‘Emotion’ and fall into the broad areas of biological, clinical, or social psychology. They are addressed experimentally using a range of measures (psychophysiology: EMG, ERP, autonomic responses; reaction time; self report).

• The acquisition and extinction of fear: It is now accepted that fear and other emotions (positive ones as well) are learned. However, the characteristics of this learning (under which conditions does it occur; how is it influenced by cognition etc) are not well understood. We have used traditional fear conditioning paradigms (for a review see Lipp & Purkis, 2005) and more recently a new evaluative learning paradigm (Lipp & Purkis, 2006; Lipp et al., 2010) to answer these questions.

• The processing of fear-relevant stimuli: Fear-relevant stimuli (animal fear-relevant: snakes and spiders; interpersonal fear-relevant: angry or fearful faces; inter group fear-relevant: other race faces) are said to be processed preferentially (preferential detection in visual search; biased attention; preferential learning etc). There is some evidence to support this claim. However, we also have begun to document some differences in the manner in which stimuli from these different classes are processed (Lipp et al., 2009a; Mallan et al., 2009; Rowles et al., 2012). This is where it gets interesting.

• The processing of facial expressions of emotion (Lipp et al., 2009b,c): Some facial expressions of emotion are said to be processed preferentially relative to others (face in the crowd effect) and even under conditions of minimal stimulus input. However, there are also reports that question this claim. Moreover, little is known about the manner in which emotional expressions are processed (holistically vs. feature based) and how processing of facial expressions interacts with the processing of other facial characteristics (age, sex, race etc).

For more details – e-mail me or see the web site of the 'Emotion, Learning, and Psychophysiology Laboratory': http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~landcp/