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 long and the short of it? An explanation of the spacing effect over long time scales
The spacing effect is the observation that repetitions spaced out in time produce better learning and retention than repetitions massed closer together in time. There has been a long history of research on the spacing ... -
Rich Reading and Reminiscing: Benefits of Parent-Preschooler Interactions for Children’s Developing Language, Behavioural Regulation, and Socio-Emotional Competencies
Given the importance of the preschool years in the development of children’s language, behavioural regulation and socio-emotional competencies, the purpose of this thesis was to empirically examine relations between ... -
Critical perspectives on the diversity of research into sexualities and health in Aotearoa/New Zealand: Thinking outside the boxes
In this article we provide a critical narrative review of the diverse contemporary research into sexualities and health in Aotearoa/New Zealand. We outline the specific colonial context of Aotearoa/New Zealand and the ... -
Aspects of Self in Schizotypy: Basic and Narrative Sense of Self among Individuals at Psychometric Risk for Schizophrenia
The contemporary approach to detecting and studying schizophrenia, known as operational psychiatry, reduces the disease to a list of perceived and inferred signs and symptoms. Advocates of the phenomenological approach to ... -
Investigating the Interaction between Motivation and Cognition in the Maternal Immune Activation Model of Schizophrenia Risk
Finding an animal model of schizophrenia that displays both reliability and validity is a difficult task. The Maternal Immune Activation (MIA) model is an animal model that mimics an epidemiological risk factor of ... -
Theta activations associated with goal-conflict processing : evidence for the revised "Behavioral Inhibition System"
In the theory of the Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS), Gray and McNaughton (2000) classified events that produce or inhibit goal-directed behaviour into two affective categories: approach versus avoidance. We expenence ... -
Stepping stones to others' minds : the relation between maternal mental and non-mental state input and social understanding in 15-, 24, and 33 month-old children
Recent research has shown that children under two years demonstrate some early social understanding. Previous research has also demonstrated that mother talk about mental states is a factor in older preschoolers' later ... -
Deception Detection: Where do I look, Upper Face or Lower Face?
Human’s ability to detect deception has an unsettling result of around chance detection (Depaulo et al., 2003; Bond & DePaulo, 2008). Both Experiment 1 and 2 tracked participant’s eye fixations during the process of detecting ... -
Exploring University Students’ Alcohol Consumption, Consequences, Motives, and Protective Behavioural Strategies during Re-Orientation Week and the Semester
Problematic alcohol consumption is an issue for university students around the world and there is growing interest in interventions targeting student drinking. To date, however, these interventions show limited effectiveness ... -
Investigation into the impact of time specific immunological insult on brain and behaviour using a neurodevelopmental rodent model of psychiatric disease
Epidemiological research has identified that exposure to maternal immune activation (MIA) confers substantial risk for later diagnosis of schizophrenia in offspring. As a result, extensive translational research has been ... -
Postsynaptic cell firing bidirectionally regulates future long-term potentiation in the rat hippocampus
Synaptic plasticity phenomena such as long-term potentiation (LTP) have been proposed as neurobiological mechanisms of learning and memory. LTP depends on coordinated presynaptic and postsynaptic activity, driven by action ... -
The development and characterization of a new mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a debilitating neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive memory loss, seizures, anxiety, personality changes and ultimately, death. Current animal models of AD have not yielded any ... -
Keeping your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer: Group Membership and Theory of Mind
Theory of Mind (ToM) is the understanding that other individuals have thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that differ from our own. Most research on ToM has focussed on the development this concept and the associated skills ... -
The Presence of a Monitor in Forensic Interviews with Child Witnesses
In New Zealand, forensic interviews with children are carried out by an interviewer with specialist training and must be monitored by a police officer or a child, youth and family professional. As well as managing the ... -
Neural basis of categorisation in a 30-million-year-old feathered reptilian dinosaur
Categorisation is a cognitive ability to group individual stimuli into different categorical groups based on their common features. The categorisation ability is not limited to human and non-human primates. Evidence ... -
Physiological Arousal, Information Processing, Performance and Expertise in Expected and Unexpected Abnormal Flight Events: An Empirical Investigation.
Aviation accident reports indicate that preventable incidents are developing into tragedies with pilots responding incorrectly to well-trained events e.g. engine failures. Recent research suggests that startle (an autonomic ... -
Comprehension of hazard warning labels for consumer products
A significant public health concern is posed by people’s inadequate comprehension of warning labels on hazardous products, such as potting mix. Inhaling or touching potting mix can lead to the development of Legionnaire’s ... -
Patterns of aggression in New Zealand children
Social aggression is a covert form of aggression, used to damage the self-esteem and/ or status of another. Previous research has shown that girls tend to utilize this form of aggression more often than physical aggression. ... -
Reversal theory and flow : toward an integrated framework of optimal experiences in adventure activities
Although adventurous pursuits are gaining popularity, many leading theoretical paradigms within the adventure literature (e.g., the Adventure Experience Paradigm) lack predictive power and depth. Flow Theory (Csikszentmihalyi, ... -
The effect of poverty on cognitive function: Does a reminder of financial hardship affect subsequent decision-making?
The conditions of poverty are thought to change the way people process information and make decisions. Past research has shown when low-income participants are reminded of their financial situation they perform worse on ...