School of Psychology
McElwain Building
The University of Queensland
St Lucia, QLD 4072
Australia

BSc, BA (Hons. 1), PhD (UQ)

I am interested in processes related to learning, attention and emotion. Current projects involve fear relevance and preferential attention; boundary conditions of evaluative learning; and learning and awareness.

Most of my work is conducted in the Emotion, Learning and Psychophysiology Laboratory: http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~landcp/

More information about my work in preferential processing and fear relevance is available on the project website: http://experiment.psy.uq.edu.au/fear/

If you heard about our snake and spider fear studies in the media and wish to participate, please go to the project website above to sign up.

Purkis, H. M. & Lipp, O. V. (2009). Are snakes and spiders special? Acquisition of characteristics of fear relevant stimuli by non fear relevant stimuli. Cognition and Emotion, 23, 430-452.

Alhadad, S., Lipp, O. V., & Purkis, H. M. (2008). Modality specific attentional startle modulation during continuous performance tasks: a brief time is sufficient. Psychophysiology, 45, 1068-1078.

Fernández, M.C., Vila, J., Lipp, O.V., & Purkis, H.M. (2008). The effect of startle reflex habituation on cardiac defense: Interference between two protective reflexes. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 69, 27-32.

Blechert, J., Michael, T., Williams, S. L., Purkis, H. M., & Wilhelm, F. H. (2008) When Two Paradigms Meet: Does Evaluative Learning Extinguish in Differential Fear Conditioning? Learning and Motivation, 39, 58-70.

Lipp, O.V., Alhadad, S., & Purkis, H. M. (2007) Startle blink facilitation during the go signal of a reaction time task is not affected by movement preparation or attention to the go signal. Neuroscience Letters, 427, 94–98.

Purkis, H.M., & Lipp, O. V. (2007). Automatic attention does not equal automatic fear: Preferential attention without implicit valence. Emotion, 7, 314-323.

Lipp, O.V., Kaplan, D. M., & Purkis, H. M. (2006). Reaction time facilitation by acoustic task-irrelevant stimuli is not related to startle. Neuroscience Letters, 409, 124-127.

Lipp, O. V. & Purkis, H. M. (2006). The effects of assessment type on verbal ratings of conditional stimulus valence and contingency judgments: Implications for the extinction of evaluative Learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behaviour Processes, 32, 431-440

Lipp, O. V. & Purkis, H. M. (2005). No support for dual process accounts of human affective learning in simple Pavlovian conditioning. Cognition and Emotion, 19, 269-282.

Purkis, H.M., & Lipp, O. V. (2001). "Does affective learning exist in the absence of contingency awareness?", Learning and Motivation, 32, 84-99.