Opportunities in the School of Psychological Science

Supervisor: Professor Claire Haworth
Contact: claire.haworth@bristol.ac.uk

We conduct research on the causes and consequences of mental health and positive well-being across the life course.

Positive well-being includes feelings of happiness, satisfaction with one’s life, and having meaning and purpose.

A key question is what happens to our mental health and well-being at key life transitions, including puberty, emerging adulthood, when becoming a new parent, at the menopause and upon retirement from the workplace. Applications are invited on any of these life transitions.

Our research uses a range of methods from psychology, behavioural genetics, and epidemiology. The research would be primarily quantitative in nature, but there is scope for a mixed-methods component.

Supervisor: Dr Karla Holmboe
Contact: karla.holmboe@bristol.ac.uk

Dr Holmboe’s research focuses on the development of executive functions during infancy and early childhood.

Executive functions (EFs) are a set of cognitive abilities that allow us to guide our behaviour and make adaptive decisions in everyday life. They provide us with the ability to control our thoughts and actions, solve problems, and multi-task. Without EFs we would be largely controlled by immediate circumstances and habitual responses.

EFs are particularly challenged in young children, who struggle to maintain and manipulate information in working memory, inhibit strong response tendencies and shift between different perspectives and actions. They are also compromised in children with developmental disorders and those with academic and social difficulties. Between 3 and 5 years of age EF skills improve rapidly. However, relatively little is known about EFs before this age.

To address this issue, Dr Holmboe is running a large-scale longitudinal project (following the same children over time) aimed at investigating the earliest development of executive functioning across infancy and toddlerhood (200 children to be assessed at 10, 16, 24 and 30 months of age). The study’s task battery includes a combination of eye-tracking tasks, touchscreen games and object play, alongside neuroimaging and physiological measures.

There is scope for several research areas within this large-scale study, focussing on specific cognitive domains, such as inhibitory control or working memory, or on the neural substrate underlying these skills. There is also the potential to investigate associations between infant EF abilities and later outcomes.

Please get in touch with Dr Holmboe if you are interested in doing a PhD on early EF development and would like to discuss potential research topics with the scope of the PhD.

Supervisor: Dr Polly Barr and Professor Markus Damian
Contact: polly.barr@bristol.ac.uk and M.Damian@bristol.ac.uk

We are interested in language production, bilingualism and how this relates to cognitive control.

Specifically, we are interested in using the advancements in online data collection to attempt to resolve the contentious debate on bilingual cognitive advantage (the mechanism resulting in cognitive reserve in older adults).

The aim of this PhD is to adopt the online method to explore a variety of questions related to bilingual language production which would clearly benefit from larger samples and a more diverse population than the typical participants available to researchers (i.e. WEIRD 18–24-year-old Psychology students).

By asking these questions to a more diverse/realistic sample we can potentially resolve the debate on whether there is a bilingual advantage in cognitive control.

Supervisor: Dr Sarah Jelbert and Professor Bruce Hood
Contact: sarah.jelbert@bristol.ac.uk and bruce.hood@bristol.ac.uk

Our research group focusses on empirical studies of positive psychology and human psychological well-being.

We teach a large undergraduate course called the ‘Science of Happiness’ and are interested in interventions to improve university student well-being.

We welcome applications from students with a background in psychology (or a related field) who are keen to pursue quantitative and/or qualitative research on these themes.

Supervisor: Dr Edwin Dalmaijer
Contact: edwin.dalmaijer@bristol.ac.uk

My research interests are best summarised as the quantitative exploration of development, both within individuals and in populations.

Broadly, I investigate how affective and cognitive faculties impact each other, and how they are affected by the environment.

I triangulate problems with narrowly focussed experiments aided by computational models of behaviour, machine learning to find complex patterns in large secondary datasets, and agent-based population simulations.

Supervisor: Dr Casimir Ludwig
Contact: c.ludwig@bristol.ac.uk

In my lab, we use behavioural experiments and computational tools to understand the "algorithms" humans use to choose actions based on uncertain information.

I am currently particularly interested in sampling-based models of cognition: the idea that agents explore internal "thought spaces" in a manner analogous to statistical sampling techniques (e.g. Monte Carlo Markov Chain, particle filtering).

A variety of projects are possible in this space, ranging from empirical (testing predictions derived from models) to theoretical/computational (developing models and generating predictions).

Supervisor: Dr Bruna da Silva Nascimento
Contact: bruna.dasilvanascimento@bristol.ac.uk

Broadly speaking, my research focuses on understanding the influence of individual (e.g., attachment styles) and cultural factors (e.g., cultural values) on relationship outcomes, including, but not limited to, relationship satisfaction and conflict.

Some specific topics I’m interested in include online dating and relationship outcomes, relationship maintenance tactics, and predictors of intimate partner violence. I often adopt quantitative and cross-cultural approaches in my studies, using surveys and experiments.