Laboratory personnel and students

The Emotion, Learning, and Psychophysiology Laboratory includes principal researchers, research assistants and postgraduate student. A key feature of the laboratory is the encouragement of student research on any topic relating to emotion, attention, associative learning and psychophysiology.

The Laboratory is under the direction of Dr Ottmar Lipp. Ottmar is an ARC Australian Professorial Fellow in the School of Psychology. He teaches in the areas of associative learning, psychophysiology and neuroscience of learning and emotion. Ottmar received his initial training in psychology at the University of Giessen, Germany, before completing a postdoctoral fellowship at UQ and joining the academic staff in 1994. Ottmar has published on topics relating to emotion, attention, habituation and Pavlovian conditioning.

Professor David Siddle is an associate of the laboratory. Before his retirement, David was the Deputy-Vice-Chancellor (Research) at The University of Queensland. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a past-President of the Society for Psychophysiological Research. David has published widely in the areas of orienting, habituation, and Pavlovian conditioning.

Dr. Helena Purkis is a UQ post doctoral fellow and gained her PhD conducting research on the manner in which stimuli can acquire properties associated with fear-relevance. Helena has research interests in attention, emotion, and prepared learning.

Dr. Kimberley Mallan is post doctoral researcher working on an ARC funded project. Kimberley’s PhD work was concerned with the acquisition of positive valence in affective learning. Kimberley’s current research is focussed on the processing of other race faces and emotion perception in the elderly.

In the School of Psychology, students may complete a PhD qualification either in combination with a coursework degree or through research only. Since many of the research questions addressed in the laboratory have direct relevance to applied areas, PhD students in the laboratory come from both programs. This ensures that a good diversity of topics is reflected in the laboratories research program.

Past PhD students and topics:

• David Neumann: The orienting response and the dissociation between skin conductance responding and secondary task reaction time.
• Simone Baker: Blink modulation during threat-related work stimuli : attention or affect?
• Chris Aitken: Using blink startle as a measure of attentional bias to threat word stimuli.
• Andrea Adam: Attentional and emotional processes in the modulation of blink startle at long lead intervals.
• Natalie Shockley: Information processing deficits in schizophrenia: A multi method approach.
• Helena Purkis: Preferential processing of fear-relevant stimuli: Phylogenesis or onthogenesis?
• Alison Waters: An investigation of information processing biases and anxiety in children.
• Alanda Thompson: The effects of passive and active attention on blink modulation at long and short lead intervals.
• Sascha Hardwick: Probing the predominant processes during anticipation of a salient event using blink startle modulation.
• Kimberley Mallan: On the acquisition of positive affect.
• Nandita Nayer: Can animal fear-relevant stimuli be processed in absence of conscious awareness?

Current PhD students and topics:

• Nicole Ehrlich: The emotional processing of acoustic stimuli in infants.
• Bronwyn Massavelli: The experience of emotion across the live span.
• Jenni Kuebbeler: The effects of mood and other context variables on the other race recognition effect.
• Sakinah Alhadad: Stimulus modality and the attentional modulation of blink startle.
• Fika Karnadewi: The interaction of invariant and variant facial features.
• Joyce Vromen: The effects of emotional states on attentional processes.
• Shuyang Chen: The effects of threat source proximity on the attentional and emotional processing of animal threat.

Smaller scale research projects are conducted by student to fulfil requirements for an honours degree or similar qualification. Many of these studies completed by honours students in the past have led to publication in peer-reviewed international journals.

Fourth year projects in 07:

• Belinda Craig: The interaction of race, age and emotional expression in categorisation and evaluation.
• Daina Dickins: The face in the crowd effect – is it indeed emotion that drives visual search.
• Daniel Madden: Happy and angry faces: preferential detection vs. preferential identification.
• Li-Min Wong: Individual differences in empathy.
• Monika Negd: Empathy under threat: Will physical threat affect empathy.
• Monique Rowles: The effect of verbal instruction on resistance to extinction after conditioning with emotional faces.
• Hayley Thomason: Resistance to extinction after conditioning with in-and out-group faces.

For full contact details or further information about staff members or PhD students, please see the staff and students section of the School's web site.