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Getting to the Heart of Hearing Loss
a public lecture by

Professor Ray Meddis
now available online

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Debi Roberson: Kids face up to disgust surprisingly late. see pdf

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Markus Bindemann’s end of award report for his ESRC grant “Human face detection in natural scenes” has just earned him an ‘outstanding’ rating by the Evaluation Directorate. (Award jointly held with Mike Burton, University of Glasgow). The report can be found here.

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Dr Mitch Callan, in collaboration with Jim Olson (University of Western Ontario) and Will Shead (McGill University), has been awarded £24,000 by the Ontario Problem Gambling Research Centre to investigate the effects of gambling advertisements on relative deprivation and gambling.

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Dr. Ayse Uskul has been awarded a British Academy Conference Support Grant (£9,308) and a European Association of Social Psychology small group meeting grant (€4,000) to co-organize a mini-conference titled ‘Debating Honour in the Context of Group Relations, Gender, the Self, and Aggression’. The conference will take place in Barcelona, Spain, between 20-24 August, 2010.

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Dr Helge Gillmeister's recent research on spatial attention in touch features on the front cover of the

May 2010 issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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Cafe Scientifique at Essex (organised by the Department of Psychology

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Grant awards: 2010

Dr Rick O’Gorman, in collaboration with Jerry Barkow (Dalhousie University) and Lynda Boothroyd (Durham University), has been awarded £35,520 by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research to investigate the influence of visual media on behaviour.

Dr. Mitch Callan has been awarded £7,162 by the British Academy to research Ageism and the Concern for Justice

Prof. Ray Meddis has been awarded £130,000  by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to research  'A biologically-inspired hearing aid'.  

Dr. Silke Paulmann has been awarded £7,452 by the British Academy to research 'Implicit emotional prosody perception in native and non-native speakers of English'.

Dr. Ayse Uskul has been awarded £7,269 by the British Academy to research ' 'The economic basis of social behaviour: Childrearing practices, sensitivity to ostracism, and conceptions of honor among farmers and herders'.

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Prof. Elaine Fox has been elected as a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science in January, 2010.

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Congratulations to Dr. Ayse Uskul who has been awarded a grant of £91.5K by the ESRC to investigate the "Promotion of Dental Care using Visual Perspectives in Mental Imagery: A Cultural Approach".

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Strickly Rakow

"lecturer is a genius" says Frank Skinner

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Congratulations to Dr. Mariko Kikutani who has recently been awarded an ESRC
Post-Doctoral Fellowship to continue her studies of Categorical Perception
of Face Identity.

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Opening of the new Centre for Brain Science

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Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008 Results

The University of Essex achieved excellent results in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) announced on 18 December 2008, being ranked in the top ten research universities in the UK.

The quality of research in the Department of Psychology was also confirmed as being top-class with over half of our research defined as either 4* (i.e., “world-leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour”) or 3* (i.e., “internationally excellent in terms of originality, significance and rigour”).

Since departments were given a quality profile rather than a single rating there are several ways to calculate league tables. One simple measure is the ‘grade point average’, which combines the proportion of work rated as 4* multiplied by 4, the proportion of 3* multiplied by 3, and so on. On this measure Psychology at Essex scored 2.6, which is above the UK average and gives us a ranking of 20th in the
UK out of 76 other Psychology departments. If we take the proportion of research rated as internationally excellent or world leading (rated 3* and 4*), then Psychology at Essex achieved one of the top ten ratings in the UK.

Professor Elaine Fox, Head of Department announced: “credit and congratulations should go to all staff whose research contributed to our RAE submission. Their excellent research and hard work has been recognized. The results are particularly impressive given that all of our staff also have teaching and administrative responsibilities for which they also receive high ratings. Our thanks also go to all technical and administrative staff in the department. Their contribution in providing a supportive environment is essential in allowing us to continue to produce top-class international research”

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New Books by members of staff

Emotion Science (A new book by Elaine Fox)

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Psychology Department "In the News"

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2 March 2009- Looking on the bright side: biased attention and the human serotonin transporter gene

Royal Society- Guardian- New Scientist- Daily Mail- Irish Times- Telegraph

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January 2009- "Counting cookies" in Wyvern

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13 January 2009- "What pain looks like" in The Independent

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27 October 2008- "Seeing colour in blindsight" in EurekAlert

28 October 2008- "Magnet triggers colours in 'blind' man's brain" in New Scientist

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