Psychology collection
The Department of Psychology offers some of the most popular and highly-rated undergraduate courses at Otago. It provides excellent preparation of students for careers in research and the profession of Psychology. Students from the postgraduate programme have achieved national and international recognition and awards and a number have gone on to positions in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, UK and the USA.
For further information go to the Department of Psychology.
Recent Deposits
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The role of possessions in the quest for immortality: Literal and symbolic mechanisms
The connection between death and personal possessions is well documented. Archaeological excavations have found that humans have historically buried their dead with the things they owned, often for the purpose of using ... -
The imagined enactment effect: An ERP analysis of motor imagery and complex everyday movements
The memory benefits linked to learning actions by self-performing them, termed the ‘enactment effect’, is well established in empirical literature. Whilst there is limited research examining imagery-related processes in ... -
Schizotypy and Suicidality: Exploring the Causal Influence of Schizophrenia Liability on Suicidal Ideation and Suicide Attempts
Suicide, suicide attempts, and suicide ideation account for a significant proportion of deaths, disability, and suffering worldwide. There is currently little knowledge about what factors causally influence risk for suicide. ... -
Temporal coding of conspecific position in the hippocampus
The aim of this experiment was to determine whether the hippocampus formed a representation of the location of another animal. It was hypothesized that place cells in the hippocampus would encode spatial information regarding ... -
Challenges of Religious Scepticism: Do those who reject the afterlife fear a visit from the dead?
Previous research suggests that some individuals hold intuitive or implicit religious beliefs despite explicit statements to the contrary. An experimental study tested whether those who do not endorse afterlife beliefs ... -
Delay activity in the Wulst of pigeons (Columba livia) displays neural correlates for both memory and reward.
The avian brain has two main visual pathways: the tectofugal pathway, that terminates in the Entopallium, and the thalamofugal pathway, that terminates in the avian Wulst. The Wulst is a parasagittal bulge located on the ... -
Does Age-Related Stereotype Threat Affect Older Adults' Recognition of Emotion?
Emotion recognition is a cognitive ability that has been demonstrated to decline with age. Older adults (aged over 60) are consistently poorer than young adults (aged 18-30) at recognising anger, fear, sadness, and happiness. ... -
Effect of Question Type and Exposure to Prior Information on Question Generation in a Simulated Interview Task
Given the key role that eyewitness evidence plays in criminal investigations, it is crucial that police investigators do not unduly constrain or contaminate witnesses’ reports. For this reason, best practice is to ask ... -
Culture and Well-being: The Associations of Self-Construals with Life Satisfaction, Mental Health, and Distress
Self-construals (SC) are overarching schemas that define the way individuals construct themselves in relation to others (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). SCs are strongly influenced by cultural milieu. They can affect well-being ... -
The effects of adult reading style on preschooler's emergent literacy skills
Recently, dialogic reading, a highly interactive adult reading style, has been advocated as the best way to read to young children (Whitehurst et al., 1988; 1994). As children's skill level interacts with adult style, ... -
Cognitive Load Theory and Flight Simulator-Based Instructional Design for Novices
As flight simulators have become more commonplace in aviation training, empirical research for the optimum instructional design to be used to train novices has been left behind. The most common accident during instructional ... -
The Effect of Anxiety on Religious Cognition
Religion is a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon that ordinarily involves shared belief in supernatural beings. Psychological perspectives on religion have tended to include either motivational biases (e.g., beliefs mitigate ... -
Interaction between limbic circuits and basal ganglia in behaviour inhibition
Changing behaviour in response to changing internal and external situations is crucial for survival. In particular, we need to inhibit ongoing, unwanted or inappropriate behaviour. Behavioural inhibition includes inhibition ... -
An alternative intervention for Bulimia
People with bulimia present with a variety of abnormal beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours. With few exceptions, studies to date have focused exclusively on the specific psychopathology of bulimia. This controlled study ... -
Put Your Smartphone Down: Preliminary Evidence that Reducing Smartphone Use Improves Psychological Well-being in People with Poor Mental Health
Smartphones have become an integral part of our daily lives. Although there is evidence that there are positive aspects to smartphone use, overuse has also been shown to lead to poorer mental health. Surprisingly, there ... -
Increasing the level of detail in adult witnesses’ event accounts: Can an example of required detail help?
Because eyewitness accounts are a critical source of evidence in many police investigations, it is important for this evidence to be both detailed and accurate. Eliciting evidence that fulfills both of these criteria, ... -
Reconceptualizing the Periaqueductal Grey: Fear, Anxiety and Motivational Systems in an Ancient Structure
The periaqueductal grey (PAG) is classically seen as a region responsible for the control of defensive reactions. This thesis provides a detailed review of anatomical and functional data on the different parts of the PAG ... -
Memory distortion and misperception in the criminal justice system
The legal system relies on witnesses to recall and recount their experiences accurately. Allegations of historic sexual abuse, for example, tend to involve little or no corroborating evidence, meaning that cases are often ... -
From Goal- to Emotion-based Helping: The Interactive Roles of Toddlers’ Social Understanding and Connectedness of Parental Mental State Talk
This longitudinal study examined the development of instrumental and empathic helping behaviours as they emerged in toddlerhood, and assessed how child self-concept and the connectedness of parental mental state discourse ... -
The Effects of Task Probability on Processing Mode in Dual-task Contexts
One of the major concerns about multitasking performance is whether dual-tasks are performed in parallel or in a strict serial sequence. The Response Selection Bottleneck (RSB) model assumes a structural bottleneck which ...