My main interests are at the intersection of social psychology and personality psychology. I am interested in investigating the interplay of personality variables (e.g., narcissism, authoritarianism, closed-mindedness, the "Big Five" personality traits) and group factors (e.g., ethnocentrism, group norms, intergroup processes, social identities, prejudice) in an attempt to understand their relationships and causal mechanisms.

My primary area of research is geriatric psychology.  Within this broad area I focus on two smaller areas: late life depression and developmental theories of aging.  Late life depression is an interesting phenomenon due to the multiple complicating factors in its diagnosis and the popular belief that old age is bleak and miserable therefore depression is somehow normal. Developmental theories require several smaller projects to test and assess a theory's validity. Further, research in this area can examine how different theories are related and interact.   

My next major geriatrics project will be to conduct treatment outcome research that may involve group and individual therapy practical training for graduate students.  Also, I hope to investigate the utility of systems theory in examining the experience of mental health treatment in older adults.

I also research cognitive factors in depression in the general adult population, specifically rumination (repetitive, recurrent, uncontrollable and intrusive thinking).  Rumination has been narrowly defined and measured for several years.  While much of the past research has been very informative, recent concerns about it’s definition and measurement now call much of what we know into question.  My research in this area is to broaden how we conceive of rumination and subsequently adjust how it is assessed.

preference in young adult and aging humans; comparative psychology; nonhuman primate behaviour and welfare; neuro/bioethics.

Current Research

Hemispheric interaction; lateralization and motor control in the aged.

In the last 15 years, understanding of how the brain processes information has increased greatly as neuro-imaging techniques have been coupled with paradigms drawn from experimental psychology to investigate information processing in individuals with typical and disturbed brain development. My research applies the insights emerging from this research to understand how early disturbances in brain development, resulting from injury, very preterm birth or genetically based developmental disorders, may influence information processing later in childhood.

I am interested in fundamental questions about human neuropsychological development, for example, the plasticity of different functional systems following early insult and/or atypical environmental experiences, and also in the application of the results of fundamental research to practical questions about how to optimize the development of children at heightened risk for problems as a result of early insult and/or atypical environmental experiences.

To date, most of my research has focused on the development of very preterm children. At the ANU I intend to broaden this focus to investigate the association between information processing and learning in children with developmental disorders such as ADHD and autism spectrum disorders. I am particularly interested in the fundamental information processes, such as attention, memory an executive functions, which are associated with learning in school and the management of behaviour in complex situations, such as peer group interaction. Ultimately I hope to extend my research focus to investigate systematic effects of malnutrition on information processing.

My current research interests follow several somewhat loosely related pathways, joined by an enduring interest in the psychological factors associated with risk of illness.

The most longstanding of these areas looks at the nature of the Type A behaviour pattern and the mechanisms through which it might influence coronary risk. In particular, I have recently been interested in the notion that frustrating the competitive components of Type A behaviour may reveal the essential mediator between the behaviour pattern and coronary risk. Current studies are examining this in relation to both cardiovascular activation (in the psychophysiological laboratory) and occupational stress (in the field and in clinical studies). The latter work extends the overall hypotheses to structural aspects of the occupational environment, thus attempting to link health psychology with occupational and organisational psychology.

Another area has to do with adolescent smoking behaviour. In the field we are looking at the influence of adolescent stressors in relation to the onset of smoking behaviour, and at the extent to which this relationship might be mediated by both personality and by aspects of the social environment. It is hoped that the outcome of this work may link into data we have already published on adolescent smoking prevention to recommend further ways of refining prevention strategies for adolescents.

This work has however led to a broader interest in the measurement and consequences of adolescent stress, and I have recently developed a refined scale of adolescent stress (the Adolescent Stress Questionnaire or ASQ-2), an earlier version of which I published about a decade ago. The work describing this new questionnaire was published in 2007 in the Journal of Adolescence, and currently forms the basis of further work on adolescent stress in relation to the development of health risk. The ASQ-2 is now widely used in international studies of adolescent stress; versions in Norwegian, Swedish, Portuguese and Lithuanian are currently available and in use, with Chinese, Dutch, French and Italian versions presently being worked on.

More recently I have worked on patterns of coping with a diagnosis of breast cancer and with the various forms of treatment for this disease. These studies address coping in relation to the toxicity of adjuvant chemotherapy in women with an early diagnosis of breast cancer. It is planned, however, to extend this work to women with metastatic breast cancer and also to both early diagnosed and metastatic cancer of the colon. We have recently published a validated measure of symptom load and impact in patients with cancer (the Canberra Symptom Scorecard), and papers are now in press describing the work on coping.

And in the last few years I have assumed the direction of the psychological component of a large prospective study of children aged 7 to 8 years at intake, designed to examine the development of health promoting behaviours over the course of primary schooling. The study, funded by the Commonwealth Institute in London and the Australian Research Council, involves the comprehensive medical, psychological and fitness assessment of a cohort of around 900 children and their follow-up over 5 years to determine the patterns of development of both health (or risk of illness) and health promoting behaviours. The first stage of data collection, including detailed bio-medical examinations and extensive psychological testing, is now complete and the cohort has been followed up on two annual occasions. Further follow-up will proceed until the primary school phase is complete, and it is anticipated that further funding will be sought to follow these young people through their high school years.

My current primary interest is in gender as a social construct. In particular I am interested in the imbalances in the salience of gender for females and males: while more females than males report that their sex is an integral part of their identity, more males than females use gender as a dimension on which to base their decisions, judgements and actions. I am interested in this phenomenon across the lifespan. A secondary interest, but one I am happy to pursue in supervision of students, is social influence and in particular influence exerted by non-powerful and radical groups.

Our sense of vision is fundamental to our ability to interact with the world. Additionally, a great deal of our understanding of how the brain functions is based on our knowledge of how it processes visual information. The aim of my research is to further our understanding of the workings of the human visual system, with an emphasis on how various visual pathways interact at different levels in the brain. While I am interested in all aspects of visual processing, my research to date has mainly focused on motion, stereopsis and face processing.

Motion Processing

Many of the objects of interest to us are in motion, so it is not surprising that the extraction of visual motion is one of the tasks that the visual system is specialised for. Indeed, a major subsystem within the brain is dedicated to motion processing. My research has focused on a number of aspects of motion processing, including determining how: different visual pathways interact at different levels in the brain; motion (dorsal pathway) and form (ventral pathway) signals interact; the sensitivity of the visual system to optic-flow information (patterns of retinal motion produced by motion through an environment); optic-flow information affects perceived stereoscopic depth; speed information is processed and how form information affects the perception of motion, transparent motion signals are processed and linking psychophysical performance to the know properties of cortical cells.

Stereoscopic Depth Processing

Having two, horizontally displaced, forward looking eyes (as opposed to laterally placed eyes) results in each eye receiving a slightly different view of the world. The visual system is able to generate a percept of depth by comparing these different images. My research on stereopsis has focused on: the characteristics of the transient stereo-system (which performs the initial extraction of depth information); the interaction of depth information in forming a coherent depth percept and the interaction of different visual pathways in depth processing.

Broadly speaking I am interested in clinical child and family psychology as well as school psychology, psychological therapy, parent training, psychological assessment and program evaluation. Also

• children's self-concept,
• dimensions and taxonomy of child psychopathology,
• conduct and anxiety disorders in children and adolescents,
• parenting and parent training,
• learning with ADHD, teaching children with ADHD,
• adolescent drinking,
• media use,
• coupling and couple education
• children, mothers and fathers in and after divorce

My research interests fall into two main areas :

1. Categorisation and identity processes in the perceptions of groups, persons, and other social objects. Under this banner, I am involved in a number of research projects examining categorisation processes at the group, person, and intra-personal level, the link between category salience and attribution, and the interaction of social and personal identity processes. Several PhD Students and Honours students are working on these topics.
    
2. The structure and functions of social attitudes and how attitudes define identities. Under this banner, I am interested in the relationships between a variety of social attitudes including attitudes toward social groups and moral issues, and the way in which clusters of attitudes are used to define social and personal identities. In particular, I have an interest in attitudes toward groups defined by race, sexual orientation, and moral attitudes towards abortion and euthanasia, and links with religious orientation and identity.

My primary research interests are in face and object recognition. One question has concerned the theoretical origin of special cognitive and neural processing for faces; we have investigated this via developmental studies of face recognition in children, and studies of experts in other object domains (e.g., dog show judges). I am also interested defining the properties of 'holistic' or 'configural' processing for faces more closely than has been done so far; my work here is using various techniques that isolate holistic/configural processing from part-based processing, and studies of adpatation aftereffects to distorted faces, to explore properties such as the size tuning or depth rotation tuning of holistic/configural processing.

My other area of expertise is memory. I have a longstanding interest in implicit memory, and some interest in false memories and working memory. I have supervised a number of Clinical Masters & PhD students examining memory function in various target populations (e.g., children with ADHD; drug users).

I have some knowledge of word recognition, reading and dyslexia; I am available as a PhD panel member on these topics, although not as primary supervisor.

Research Assistants

For copies of papers etc, please email me or my research assistant Stefan (stefan.horarik@anu.edu.au)

Visual Neuroscience

My main research interest is in investigating the relationship between language and psychopathology. In particular, I am interested in studying the implications of language for the development of emotion regulation abilities and metacognitive abilities involved in enduring problems of emotion regulation that characterises many forms of psychopathology. For example, my current interests include examining the relationships between language and autobiographical memories for traumatic events and their connections to post trauma adjustment; and investigations of the language for mental states in OCD.

Clinically my research focuses on research that extends understanding of the nature and development of anxiety disorders across the life span particularly OCD and PTSD. My work with OCD investigates the relationship between emotional experience and the problems that arise in various "cognitive" domains for OCD sufferers.

I am also a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Mental Health Research where I am involved in the evaluation of treatment and prevention programs for adolescent depression and anxiety as well as systematic reviews and meta-analyses of health interventions and problems.

I am an experimental cognitive psychologist, with a particular interest in researching how humans perceive and evaluate visual information. My research has focussed on understanding the perceptual, cognitive, and neural mechanisms involved in processing the human face. In addition to clarifying how healthy children, adolescents and adults perceive faces, my research aims to uncover the reasons why some people have difficulties recognising the identity and expressions of others. My primarily cognitive research intersects with a number of fields: perception, emotion, attention, memory, learning, development, individual differences, cognitive neuropsychology, neuroscience and genetics. I am willing to supervise projects that involve cognition, particularly face and object recognition, emotion, attention and memory.

Recent Projects

• We have been interested in clarifying the role of attention in the recognition of facial identity and facial expression. In particular, our work has examined whether we are biased to attend to faces and whether face processing is rapid, unconscious, mandatory and capacity-free. Current projects are assessing the unconscious, implicit and explicit recognition of facial expression in children, adolescents and adults using cognitive, event-related potential (ERP) and facial electromyographic (EMG) techniques.
  
• Approximately 2-3% of the general population find it very difficult to recognise other people via their face, a condition known as developmental or congenital prosopagnosia. We have shown that severe face recognition difficulties have a familial tendency, are associated with abnormal visual scan paths and we have developed a training program that improved the face recognition skills of a child with developmental prosopagnosia. We are currently comparing face recognition skills in children with autism and developmental prosopagnosia and assessing covert recognition in developmental prosopagnosia with both magnetoencephalography (MEG) and cognitive tasks.
• I manage an online prosopagnosia register where people with lifelong difficulties recognising faces can register their details and be invited to participate in research projects.
• The ability to accurately and rapidly recognise facial expressions facilitates social interactions. We have shown that removal of the left amygdala impairs the detection of briefly presented fearful faces and that social anxiety affects the processing of angry faces. We have also collected Australian norms for facial expression stimuli. Ongoing projects are assessing facial expression recognition in patients with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex and in individuals with borderline personality disorder and high levels of social anxiety.
• We have also investigated why some faces might be more attractive than others.

Academic and Research Background

• Honorary Associate, Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science (MACCS), Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia (2009-2011)
• Postdoctoral research fellow, MACCS, Macquarie University (2002-2009)
• Ph.D. Psychology (Awarded with Distinction). (2004). The role of attention in the detection and identification of faces. School of Psychology, University of Western Australia.
  
• B.Sc. (Psych, Hons 1). (1997). Effects of verbalization and expertise on the recognition of homogeneous novel objects. School of Psychology, University of Wollongong.

I have recently returned from a postdoctoral position at The University of Newcastle, UK, and then a research position at the Helsinki University of Technology where I have been using magnetoencephalographic (MEG) brain imaging techniques to investigate early cortical mechanisms in reading.

My primary research interest is in the brain mechanisms involved when we read, and how they might be different for people who cannot read - who are dyslexic. What is involved here is unclear, dyslexia is fundamentally a difficulty in phonics, yet we repeatedly demonstrate that children and adults with dyslexia have concomitant visual and auditory processing difficulties. I am interested in using the spatio-temporal capabilities of MEG to look at the time course of information flow through the brain when we read or engage in the skills necessary for reading, such as audio-visual integration. Along these lines, I am also interested in early attentional processing and interactions between the dorsal and ventral visual pathways. Again using psychophysics and neuroimaging, I am interested in the role of the dorsal visual stream in mediating visual responses.

I am also interested in the neural mechanisms involved in synaesthesia, and how an understanding of synaesthesia might contribute to our understanding of the interactions between different neural populations. One way in which different parts of the brain communicate may be through the use of different oscillatory signatures, therefore I am also interested in event-related synchronisation and desychronisation of populations of cells in the cortex as a mechanism of neural interaction.

Current Research

When immigrants and converts are not truly one of us: Examining the social psychology and developmental antecedents of marginalizing racism (ARC-Funded, 3-Year Discovery Grant with Professor Michael Smithson and Dr. Diana Grace).

1. The social psychology of stereotyping and prejudice: This work explores issues at the heart of research into social categorization, social cognition and intergroup relations. More specifically it addresses topics such as the relationship between personality and prejudice (implicit and explicit), the conditions under which ingroup and outgroup favouritism will be evident in intergroup relations, and the emergence of system (il)legitimacy and processes of social change.

2. The relationship between self-categorization processes and personal identity: This area of research links social identity processes to interpersonal and individual processes. The aim is to explore a new way of thinking about personality that is based on the self-categorization analysis of the self and personal identity. The work has implications for understanding both the variability and stability of personality and how personality processes are intimately bound up with contemporary political and societal forces.  Through work with the ACT Department of Education and Training this work has been extended to issues of psychological well-being and learning outcomes.

3. The interface of social and organisational psychology: This work looks at the contribution of groups and group membership to issues such as leadership, power, motivation and productivity, communication, diversity management, organizational identification and subgroup/team relations.

My areas of research are in eating disorders and obesity, focusing on psychosocial factors implicated in the aetiology, maintenance and treatment outcome of these conditions. These psychosocial variables include motivation to change, maladaptive schema, attentional biases to shape- and weight-related information, and interpersonal problems (e.g., social rejection).

Ignorance and Uncertainty, Risk, Decision Making, Fuzzy Logic, Statistical Methods for Psychological Research, Social Dilemmas, Philosophy and Social Psychology of Science

Broadly, my research interests focus on social identity and self-categorization processes in the following domains:

• Political Solidarity and Social Change
• Social Influence, Leadership, Power and Prejudice
• Individuality and Personality

Research Students

Ben Jones (2009 - ongoing, PhD Advisor) 

Laura Crowe (2009, Honours Supervisor) 

Lisa Macnaughton (2009, Honours Advisor) 

My research is mainly focussed on the cognitive processes underlying social cognition and behavior, including group & person perception, social categorization, self-categorization and the formation of socially shared knowledge. My approach to these topics combines traditional, social psychological research with techniques from sociology (social network analysis) and computational modeling (connectionist & multi-agent modeling).  I have also recently developed a socio-cognitive approach to the formation of personal and social identities and collective knowledge structures in general.  I am currently supervising a number of projects in this area, including one that looks at the formation of organizational identity and its impact on the well-being of employees, and the ability of an organization to implement change.  I am also interested in agent-based models to explore how social networks evolve over time and are shaped by the complex interaction between individual and group level factors (individual characteristics, communication, social influence and network structure).  Such simulations can help in exploring how (new) ideas and innovations spread through social collectives, and what role opinion leaders play in this process.

My current areas of research interest focus on empathy and the related concept of theory of mind, sex differences in romantic jealousy, borderline and narcissistic personality traits, and psychotherapy process research. My interests in relation to empathy and theory of mind, focus on the implications of theoretical and empirical work on theory of mind and its development for our understanding of empathy in therapeutic settings. A related area is theory of mind deficits in personality disorder and the implications of this for psychological interventions with this population. My interests in relation to jealousy focuses on understanding the nature of the well documented sex differences in romantic jealousy. In relation to borderline and narcissistic traits, recent projects have looked at the relationship between attachment style, empathy and these traits and on the discriminability of borderline personality and covert narcissism. Finally, I have a general interest in psychotherapy process research and current work I supervise focuses on the development of a measure of mentalisation based on psychotherapy transcripts and the role of attachment style of therapist and client on the therapy process.

My main research interest is in the area of interpersonal functioning and psychological attachment in adolescents and adults. I currently have a research program focused on examining adolescent’s relationships with parents, peers, and friends from the point of view of attachment theory. I am particularly interested in the relationship between the quality of different types of interpersonal relationships and psychological well-being and adjustment (depression, anxiety, happiness, life satisfaction, self-efficacy etc.). I also have a range of other research interests including marital relationships, adjustment to new parenthood, postnatal depression, projective assessment techniques, and the relationship between psychology and art.