Research in the Psychology pathway spans the breadth of the psychological sciences, and incorporates cross-disciplinary working with cognate areas such as linguistics, neuroscience, and the allied healthcare professions. Across the pathway, we have specific expertise in developmental psychology, language and cognition (typical and atypical), social cognition, mental health and healthcare, and perception and action. Many existing research collaborations span our partner institutions allowing cross-institutional supervision opportunities for students.

At all our partner institutions, a wide range of methodological approaches are used, with an emphasis on producing open and reproducible research. As psychological research crosses many interdisciplinary boundaries, potential applicants must ensure that their specific project fits within the overall remit of the ESRC more closely than with that of the other research councils (e.g. AHRC, MRC, BBSRC, EPSRC).

Programmes eligible for NWSSDTP funding

The list below includes all Master’s programmes that are eligible for NWSSDTP funding and the typical PhD programmes that are supported under this pathway. Other PhD programmes within these universities may be considered – please reach out to the relevant Pathway Representative (see contact details below) or the NWSSDTP Office if the PhD programme you are interested in is not listed here. Please note that the NWSSDTP does not fund standalone Master’s programmes – these can only be funded as part of a Master’s + PhD Studentship.

Keele University

• MSc Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience
• MSc Applied Child Psychology  
• MSc Social Research
• MSc Forensic Psychology
• MSc Psychological Research Methods
• MSc Health Psychology
• PhD Psychology

University of Lancashire

• MSc Applied Clinical Psychology
• PhD Psychology
• MSc Applied Forensic Psychology

Lancaster University

• MSc Psychology and Behavioural Analytics
• MSc Psychological Research Methods
• MSc Developmental Disorders
• MSc Developmental Psychology
• PhD Psychology

University of Liverpool

• MSc Investigative and Forensic Psychology
• Research Methods in Psychology
• PhD Psychology

University of Manchester

• MRes Experimental Psychology and Data Science
• MRes Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology
• MSc Neuroimaging for Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience
• MSc Health Psychology
• MSc Clinical and Health Psychology
• PhD Psychology
• PhD Cognitive Neuroscience
• PhD Experimental Psychology

For information on how to apply for funding, please visit our How to Apply page.

Pathway Representatives

Contact details for Psychology Pathway Representatives can be found here: https://nwssdtp.ac.uk/about/contact-us/pathway-leads/

Current Psychology Pathway Students and Alumni

The Development of Supportive Modules for a Transdiagnostic E-Health Programme

This research focuses on the development of eHealth interventions. It aims to identify effective behaviour change techniques in alcohol, gambling and emotional eating online interventions to inform the development of transdiagnostic programmes. Once developed, the effectiveness and feasibility of the transdiagnostic programme will be assessed.

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Children’s Mathematical Development: The Emergence of Cardinality and Associated Neural Correlates

With advancements in technology there is an increasing requirement for mathematical proficiency. Development of the cardinal principle, the understanding that the final number in a count represents the total number of items, is a key competency and a significant predictor of mathematical achievement in young children. This project aims to provide a more complete account of how this skill develops.

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Testing the Role of Statistical Learning in Language Development

This project will test the hypothesis that infants’ ability to track statistics in the speech they hear plays a foundational role in their language development. It will also investigate whether individual differences in statistical learning are related to real-world language development.

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Observation and Imagery of Action in Parkinson’s

Parkinson’s is a neurodegenerative condition which can drastically affect movement, with symptoms including rest tremor, postural instability and bradykinesia (slowness of movement). Emerging evidence indicates that observing others move (action observation) and imagining movement (motor imagery) can stimulate movement-related areas of the brain. This project explores whether these techniques could be used to improve movement in people with Parkinson’s.

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Investigating the impact and underpinnings of complex PTSD among people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders

My project investigates whether and how complex post-traumatic stress disorder affects people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (also known as ‘psychosis’). I use mobile phone apps to measure this impact on a daily basis, and structural and resting-state functional MRI to measure this impact on a neurobiological basis. It is hoped this project will improve trauma-informed care for people with psychosis.

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Discrimination, Disadvantage, and Mental Health in the UK

My research aims to better understand the impact of experiencing discrimination on mental health in the UK. Using existing longitudinal survey data, I will cross-sectionally and prospectively explore this association, with hopes to advance understanding of the temporal nature of the relationship. The project will also explore the impact of living in social disadvantage on these experiences.

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Multi-agency management of risk in relation to missing children

I will work in partnership with police and their partners, adopting a phenomenon-driven approach to conceptualise the problem of multi-agency management of risk for children missing from care, leveraging existing theories relating to inter-team coordination to better understand and address this.

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Is violence associated with autonomic responses to socio-affective pain stimuli: a comparison across groups of individuals with convictions for violent and non-violent crimes?

This project aims to identify the relationship between interpersonal violence and autonomic empathic responding, using psychophysiological techniques to examine the capacity and motivation to empathise in individuals with violent convictions and controls. The work will employ paradigms from social-cognitive and affective neuroscience and stimuli depicting others in pain, combined with state-of-the-art equipment for measuring autonomic arousal based on the pupil dilation.

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The emergence of domain-specific implicit-mentalising

Implicit mentalising involves the automatic awareness of others’ perspectives. While crucial to successful social functioning, the domain-specificity of implicit mentalising is debated. The present Project investigates the content of co-representation during task sharing via a surprise implicit image recognition task, appended to a Joint Simon task. This will elucidate the underlying mechanisms and domain-specificity of implicit mentalising.

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Disrupted sense of self and distorted body representation in Anorexia Nervosa: The role of interoceptive deficits

My PhD is focused on the role interoception (the ability to sense internal signals arising from one’s own body, e.g., the heartbeat) in the development and maintenance of Anorexia Nervosa (AN). In particular, I am interested in how interoceptive deficits relate to body distortions and changes in sense of self in AN and how new therapies can be developed to address this.

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Investigating the Effects of Sports-Related Head Impact on Brain Function

This project studies how head impacts in sports affect balance, brain function, thinking, and hearing abilities in young adult athletes. By examining the short-term effects of these impacts, we use brain measuring, balance tests, cognitive assessments, and hearing evaluations to understand these changes better and develop objective measures to monitor athletes.

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The Role of Angular Gyrus in Prediction, Production, and Comprehension

The angular gyrus (AG) has been suggested to play a key role in the sense-making process across different domains and tasks. However, its specific role in sense-making remains elusive. This project will lead to a novel theory of how we make sense of the world and why this is crucial for learning and healthy language production.

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The prevalence of alcohol problems in the UK police service, and the comorbidity with mental health problems and occupational stress

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Sense of self, social functioning and response to multidisciplinary treatment for chronic pain

My research aims to understand how interpersonal dynamics and the quality of relationships with others can affect how people cope with and respond to multidisciplinary treatment for chronic pain. Grounded in attachment theory the project aims to understand why and how variability in patient and partner behaviour can influence treatment outcomes.

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Disentangling the causes and consequences of individual differences in language ability

The social value of improving early language skills will be evaluated by establishing how they are related to a variety of important life outcomes. 1970 British Cohort Study and Millennium Cohort Study data will be used to investigate adult outcomes such as employment and relationship status and adolescent outcomes such as mental health, academic performance and peer relationships.

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Enhancing Working Memory through Combined Cognitive Training and Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation (tACS)

With a worldwide ageing population the development of interventions against age-related cognitive decline are more important than ever. For my project, I will be using Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation (a form of non-invasive brain stimulation) concurrent with Cognitive Training to investigate whether we can improve Working Memory in older adults.

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Investigating the underlying causes of the verb-marking deficit in English-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder

This project will investigate the causes of the verb-marking deficit in English-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) by developing a new sentence repetition paradigm and using it to test three different accounts of differences in the performance of children with DLD and language-matched controls: The Defaulting Account, The Competing Sources of Input Account and The Impaired Sequence Learning Account.

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Social cognition in children and chimpanzees

My PhD research explores the evolution of social behaviour in primates, focusing on the balance between cooperation and competition. I investigate aspects of human sociality, like fairness, deception, and distrust, and how these behaviours develop over childhood. I use a comparative approach with chimpanzees to uncover what we share with our closest living relatives, and what possibly makes humans unique.

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Talent and Systemising: the effects of curiosity, interest and obsession on semantic implicit learning

My doctoral research focuses on how neurotypical and autistic individuals, including children and adults, develop semantic specialisations, and whether their implicit visual-linguistic knowledge is modulated by curiosity states. My PhD project combines qualitative, sMRI and cognitive-behavioural studies to investigate the nature, neural underpinnings and psychophysiology of the three states.

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