Summer Research Program

Loneliness and Connectedness: Understanding Children’s Social Worlds

Supervisor: Dr Callyn Farrell c.farrell@uq.edu.au

Duration: : 6 Weeks

Loneliness is increasingly recognised as a significant developmental issue, with research linking it to poorer mental health, reduced academic engagement, and long-term wellbeing challenges (Loades et al., 2020; Maes et al., 2019; Qualter et al., 2015). While often associated with older adults, loneliness is common in childhood and adolescence and may peak during the teenage years. Importantly, it is not just the absence of social contact but reflects a lack of meaningful group memberships and identification, as described by the Social Identity Approach to Health (Haslam et al., 2018). In contrast, feeling socially connected through family, peers, school communities, or extracurricular activities provides belonging, support, and purpose, key protective factors for children’s wellbeing (Jose et al., 2012; Farrell et al., 2024).

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Minds at Play: Investigating Parents’ Mental State Talk

Supervisor: Dr Callyn Farrell c.farrell@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

Parents engage with their boys or girls in different ways from birth. This is evident in the provision of toys (e.g., dolls for girls and trucks for boys), décor found in children’s bedrooms (e.g., blue walls for boys, pinks walls for girls) and the amount and type of language parents use when interacting with their children (Crowley et al., 2021; Farrell et al., 2023; Farrell et al., 2025). One form of parental language input, mental state language, is critical for children’s social development (Tompkins et al. 2018). This form of language involves parent talk about thoughts, desires and emotions. A relatively small body of research suggests that parents may vary the amount and quality of mental state language when engaging with their child based on that child’s gender, although findings are inconsistent (see Farrell et al., 2025). This project investigates whether parents use different amounts and types of mental state language in play with their child using gendered/neutral toys.

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Safer by Choice: How People Manage Risk When they Use Drugs

Supervisor: Dr Carmen Lim c.lim@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

In Australia, harm reduction is often discussed in the context of policies and services. Beyond formal programs, many people adopt their own strategies to reduce risks when they use drugs. These may include moderating frequency or quantity, using in safer environments, spacing doses, seeking peer advice, or checking substances before use. Such strategies can be shaped by personal beliefs, prior experiences, cultural norms, and access to information.

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Preventing the intergenerational transmission of family violence and child maltreatment

Supervisor: Dr Carolina Gonzalez  c.gonzalez@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

Despite national and international efforts, many children still grow up being exposed to violence in their homes. This project offers the opportunity to contribute to three projects at different stages of development: 

1. Corporal punishment: Based on two published studies, this project seeks to understand social norms towards corporal punishment. This will involve the design of a pilot study to inform public campaigns to promote a total ban of corporal punishment in Australia.
2. Risk and protective factors of child maltreatment: This project is part of an international collaboration to examine risk and protective factors influencing the intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment across cultures. This project is at the stage of data collection.  
3. Parents’ wellbeing and cultural diversity in early childhood: This project seeks to understand the interplay between parenthood, cultural background, and adversity. This project will involve the design of a pilot study.

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Green parenting: Understanding parents’ role in times of climate change

Supervisor: Dr Carolina Gonzalez  c.gonzalez@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

Parents are key role models for their children, and their attitudes and behaviours towards the environment shape their children’s care for the environment. This project offers involvement in an ongoing research project focused on the novel concept of green parenting, i.e., parents’ promotion of their children’s pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. This project led by researchers from UQ and the University of Southern Queensland have conducted a scoping review, a parent survey, and interviews with parents. This summer project will focus on literature review, analysis of collected data (quantitative data and potentially qualitative data), and writing research reports and publications. This project will also offer the opportunity of engaging in proposals for future research aimed at seeking further funding opportunities and research collaborations. This project will also offered opportunities to engage in others research projects to enhance learning experience. 

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Uncertainty and Risk Evaluation Across Different Age Groups

Supervisor: Dr David Sewell d.sewell@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

Making good decisions requires that adequately account for uncertainty. Sometimes uncertainty is primarily built into the decision environment and other times it reflects limits on metacognitive insights into our own abilities. This project will investigate how children and adults articulate uncertainty in their own decision processes—via confidence reports. The project will also examine how children and adults differ in the ways in which they process uncertainty in task environments where people make repeated sequential decisions.

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Cannabis in Australia. How did we get here?

Supervisor: Dr Daniel Stejepanovic  d.stjepanovic@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

Cannabis policy and perceptions have been shifting dramatically, transforming from something that was seen as a dangerous drug to being a prescribed medicine. Because of these rapid shifts, it is important to understand how people use cannabis, what forces shape our perceptions of cannabis, and what role the media plays in this.

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AI-Generated Robot Stimuli for Social Neuroscience Experiments

Supervisor: Prof Eric Vanman e.vanman@psy.uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

Are you curious about the future of human–robot interaction and how psychology can help us understand it? This project gives you the opportunity to help build a cutting-edge library of robot images and videos using AI tools, which will then be tested with both online participants and lab-based physiological measures. You’ll contribute to research that asks big questions about how people perceive, evaluate, and emotionally respond to robots, from friendly androids to uncanny humanoids.

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Defining Trauma: A cross-disciplinary review of the literature

Supervisor: Dr Fiona MacCallum f.maccallum@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

In recent years, there has been a marked increase in public and professional awareness of psychological trauma and its potential impacts, with terms such as trauma, complex trauma, PTSD, complex PTSD, intergenerational trauma, and “Big T/little t” trauma becoming part of everyday discourse. However, the different meanings and therefore the utility of such terms is often unclear, leading to inconsistencies and communication challenges across health professionals. This project aims to undertake a cross-disciplinary systematic review of how trauma concepts are defined within a) academic literature across psychology and other related fields, and b) grey literature and associated professional bodies. Understanding these definitional differences is crucial, as they shape how trauma is studied, interpreted, and addressed in practice. As a summer scholar, you will assist in conducting the systematic review using relevant academic databases, helping to map and analyse the conceptual landscape of trauma across disciplines.

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Behavioural Addictions on Problematic Video Gaming and Financial Trading

Supervisor: Dr Gary Chung c.chan4@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

This project involves working with the National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research (NCYSUR). NCYSUR conducts research on alcohol, cannabis, nicotine and vaping, extra-medical prescription stimulants, and behavioural addictions. Scholars will join a collaborative team and may contribute across multiple topics. Core activities focus on literature reviews and evidence synthesis across the research process, including searching, screening, data extraction, critical appraisal where relevant, and preparing brief summaries to inform ongoing projects.

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The cognitive basis of creative thought: A neuropsychological investigation

Supervisor: Prof Gail Robinson gail.robinson@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

Creative thought - the ability to generate novel and appropriate ideas - is fundamental to human advances throughout history and adaptive daily functioning. Despite universal interest in creativity, we are still far from understanding its cognitive and neural bases. Currently, creativity has typically been studied as a distinct cognitive ability with its own neural mechanisms. In the parallel and yet unconnected approach, neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience evidence has suggested that the generation, evaluation and selection of novel and adaptive ideas are supported by neurocognitive mechanisms underlying controlled retrieval and flexible manipulation of acquired knowledge.

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Shaping the Sense of Touch: Exploring Brain Plasticity in the Somatosensory Cortex

Supervisor: Dr Harriet Dempsey Jones h.dempseyjones@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

How flexible is the adult brain? This project investigates how experience can change the way we perceive touch, focusing on the somatosensory cortex — the brain region that represents our skin and fingers. Students will help design and run behavioural experiments that test how simple interventions, such as tactile training or synchronous finger stimulation, can improve or disrupt touch perception.

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How do people infer social information from dynamic naturalistic facial expressions?

Supervisor: A/Prof Jess Taubert j.taubert@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

An important question when considering faces in the real world, is that they are always moving. However, our understanding of how observers perceive and infer socially relevant information from dynamic faces has traditionally relied upon highly recognisable posed videos of prototypical expressions such as ‘happy’ or ‘angry’, displayed by either humans or heavily morphed computer-generated faces. While such stimuli may provide useful experimental control in the lab, they are heavily criticised for their ecological validity in the real world.

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Remembering to remember: Prospective memory function in everyday life

Supervisor: Prof Julie Henry julie.henry@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

Prospective memory (PM) is the fundamental neurocognitive capacity that allows us to form a future intention and then remember to execute that intention at a later point in time, or to ‘remember to remember’. Our daily lives are filled with numerous trivial tasks that depend on PM, such as remembering to switch off a light, or to check how much milk is left in the fridge. However, many other planned intentions can have more serious consequences if not fulfilled in a timely manner, such as remembering to take medication, to check food cooking, to turn off appliances, or to pay bills. Such PM failures compromise a person’s ability to live independently and have emerged as one of the strongest personal risk factors for nursing home placement in late adulthood. 

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Advancing Research on Cannabis Use and Health across Young people. 

Supervisor: Dr Janni Leung j.leung1@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

This project involves working with the National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research (NCYSUR). NCYSUR conducts research on alcohol, cannabis, nicotine and vaping, extra-medical prescription stimulants, and behavioural addictions. Scholars will join a collaborative team and may contribute across multiple topics. Core activities focus on literature reviews and evidence synthesis across the research process, including searching, screening, data extraction, critical appraisal where relevant, and preparing brief summaries to inform ongoing projects.

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How does accent affect our social interactions?

Supervisor: Dr Kana Imuta  k.imuta@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

In modern day multicultural societies, accent is one of the most meaningful cues to one’s background. We readily use accent to evaluate others and interact accordingly, but how this manifests in prejudice and discrimination is hardly recognised by society and largely unexplored by researchers. As a Summer Scholar, you will contribute to a research programme that seeks to understand how and why accent comes to be a powerful cue in our everyday social interactions. The specific tasks will be discussed with the Summer Scholar closer to the time of project commencement, but will likely involve helping with developing an empirically validated database of voice recordings and some ‘hands-on’ research (e.g., recruitment, data collection, coding) with children and/or adults in this line of work.

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Would AI lie to you?

Supervisor: A/Prof Michael Noetel  m.noetel@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

As AI systems become more capable, understanding whether they might deceive their users becomes crucial for safety. This project investigates "scheming"—when AI systems might pursue goals misaligned with human values while appearing cooperative. Just as evolutionary pressures create deceptive behaviours in nature (like mimicry in butterflies or playing dead in possums), training pressures might inadvertently create AIs that conceal their true objectives.

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Metacognition in early adolescence

Supervisor: Dr Natasha Matthews  n.matthews1@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

Work in our research group is interested in understanding the development of metacognition during early adolescence. Metacognition can be considered as ‘thinking about thinking’ and involves the awareness, monitoring, and control of cognitions (Flavell, 1979). This skill is important for regulating learning and cognitive flexibility and undergoes a period of extensive development during the ages 10-15 years.

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From Self-Talk to TikTok: Investigating Ageism Inside and Out

Supervisor: Dr Sarah Coundouris s.coundouris@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

Ageism directed at older people is unique in two ways: it is socially condoned in a manner that other types of prejudice are not, and the animus is eventually self-directed. This summer research project includes assistance on two tasks to deepen our understanding of how ageism operates both internally and externally.

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Motor Decisions under Temporal Uncertainty and Choice Demands

Supervisor: Dr Sam Armstrong samuel.armstrong@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

Everyday actions unfold in uncertain environments: knowing when a signal will appear, which action to take, or whether a cue can be trusted. This project involves experimental research with human participants, examining how the motor system plans and prepares voluntary movements under different kinds of uncertainty. Scholars will recruit and test adult participants using computer-based tasks to assess how temporal expectancy, choice demands, and cue reliability shape motor decisions. 

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A meta-analytic review of the relationship between social connectedness and social cognition

Supervisor: Dr Sarah Grainger s.grainger@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

Social cognition refers to the skills involved in detecting, understanding and responding to social information in our environment, and includes capacities such as emotion recognition and theory of mind. Recent theorizing has suggested that breakdowns in these capacities may lead to poorer social connectedness. This has been somewhat supported in the empirical literature but the results are mixed and the strength of this relationship is not clear.

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Exploring children’s emerging social reasoning

Supervisor: Dr Shalini Gautam s.gautam@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

As adults, we often engage in complex social and moral reasoning. For example, if you notice someone act in a mean way, you might wonder whether this was intentional, and/or whether something outside of their control made them act in that way. Young children, however, do not always integrate these kinds of factors into their social judgments. For the present project, we will explore how and when children begin to consider contextual factors in their social judgements. We will work with children around pre-school aged to middle childhood to explore how their reasoning about social outcomes changes with age. 

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Optimising work breaks and recovery for employee well-being

Supervisor: Dr Stacey Parker s.parker@psy.uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

I am offering the chance to be a part of a larger project, working together with myself, my PhD student, and other collaborators, on experimental and experience sampling studies about how people protect their fatigue and sustain their vitality during work and after working. Putting effort into work can drain energy. If employees are unable to recover in their downtime from work, then this can lead to burnout and other health-related issues over the longer-term. However, there’s a range of simple and daily practices, that employees can implement themselves, which can help to mitigate such issues. In this program of research, we evaluate such practices, including the use of micro breaks, recovery strategies, and a range of other daily practices. 

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The effect of top-down knowledge on

Supervisor: A/Prof Stef Becker s.becker@psy.uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

This project aims to address an important question in research on attention and eye movements – viz., whether knowledge can help us find a visually salient object, or whether knowledge can only speed search when the object is not (very) salient. This question has been debated in attention research, with one faction maintaining that visually salient objects are automatically attended, via a very fast stimulus-driven mechanism, while others maintain that no such mechanism exists, and instead all attention shifts are driven by our intentions and goals (while saliency is just a bottom-up limitation). 

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The epidemiology of alcohol, tobacco, and substance use in adolescents

Supervisor: Dr Tesfa Yimmer t.yimer@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

This project involves working with the National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research (NCYSUR). NCYSUR conducts research on alcohol, cannabis, nicotine and vaping, extra-medical prescription stimulants, and behavioural addictions. Scholars will join a collaborative team and may contribute across multiple topics. Core activities focus on literature reviews and evidence synthesis across the research process, including searching, screening, data extraction, critical appraisal where relevant, and preparing brief summaries to inform ongoing projects.

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The WEIRDest Families in the World: Who Shapes Parenting and Family Psychology?

Supervisor: Mr Tianyi Ma tianyi.ma@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

Parenting and family psychology research is often shaped by those who hold power in publishing—editors and authors. Yet, the field has long been criticized for reflecting primarily WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) perspectives. This project aims to map the representation of voices shaping the discipline by examining the composition of editorial boards and the authorship of leading parenting and family psychology journals (e.g., Journal of Family Psychology, Parenting, Journal of Child and Family Studies, Family Relations, Family Process). 

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The WEIRDest Families in the World: Where Does Parenting and Family Psychology Research Happen?

Supervisor: Mr Tianyi Ma tianyi.ma@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

Parenting is an experience shared by people around the world, however psychology is often criticized for its reliance on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) populations, raising questions about the global relevance of research findings. This project focuses on the participants and study locations reported in recent parenting and family psychology research. The scholar will help conduct a scoping review of leading journals in the field (e.g., Journal of Family Psychology, Parenting, Journal of Child and Family Studies, Family Relations, Family Process). 

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Generative artificial intelligence and behavioural science approaches to youth vaping and prevention

Supervisor: Dr Tianze Sun tianze.sun@uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

This project explores how generative artificial intelligence (AI) and behavioural science can be used to reduce nicotine use and promote healthier behaviours among young people. We will be building on our recent JAMA Network Open study which showed that youth co-designed AI-generated materials were perceived to be just as effective as those developed by official health agencies. 

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Collaborative project for journalism/communications students (or those with journalism/communication experience) to develop/progress a podcast/vodcast, blog or other social media translating research findings for a community audience

Supervisor: Prof Winnifred Louis w.louis@psy.uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

We will accept up to 6 journalism/communications students (or those with journalism/communication experience). The task will be to work with others to create/progress a podcast/vodcast, a blog or other social media based on research conducted by researchers within the Social Change Lab. They will be for the purpose of translating research findings for a community audience. The specific topics for the projects will be discussed and decided in collaboration with the students.

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Literature Review & Infographic

Supervisor: Prof Winnifred Louis w.louis@psy.uq.edu.au

Duration: 6 Weeks

The project will focus on a specific topic relevant to the research areas covered by researchers in the Social Change Lab. You will be asked to explore and engage previous research on the topic. This project involves looking at the psychological research as well as interdisciplinary research in other areas. The specific research topics for the projects will be advised closer to the time.

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