Laboratory personnel and students

The Emotion, Learning, and Psychophysiology Laboratory includes principal researchers, research assistants and postgraduate students. 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 becoming the Deputy-Vice-Chancellor of Research at The University of Queensland, David was Professor and Head of the School of Psychology. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society, 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 reflex and ERP indices of attentional and emotional processing.

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: Why do we fear what we fear: A learning based account of stimulus fear relevance.
• 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.

Current PhD students and topics:

• 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.
• Nicole Ehrlich: The emotional processing of acoustic stimuli in infants.
• Nandita Nayer: Can animal fear-relevant stimuli be processed in absence of conscious awareness?

Smaller scale research projects are conducted by students 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:

• Randall Fernando: Does the arousal value of a negatively valenced stimulus facilitate associative learning?
• Sarah Forbes: The role of feature detection in preferential attention to fear-relevant animals.
• Marilia Libera: The effect of context change and verbal instruction on reversal learning of affective valence.
• Ranjiv Randhawa: Do preferential detection of and enhanced interference by fear-relevant stimuli reflect on the same underlying attentional process?
• Daniel Stepanovic: The utility of facial EMG as an index of emotional learning.
• Mingshen Tan: The effect of context change and verbal instruction on extinction and renewal of affective learning.

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.