Summer and Winter research projects

Dr Carys Chainey: Supporting the next generation of parenting and family science professionals (PDF, 97.4 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Early career researchers and practitioners working in parenting and family science are situated within a unique context, with challenges and opportunities specific to this field. The support offered to this unique group should be informed by evidence, to ensure the next generation of professionals are adequately supported in ways that matter to them.

Dr Carys Chainey: Focusing on families: Evidence-based approaches to youth justice (PDF, 126.3 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Youth justice is a pressing issue in Australia, with major consequences for young people, families, victims, communities and public expenditure. Although public debate often focuses on punitive responses, research points to the importance of prevention, rehabilitation, and family- and community-based supports.

Dr Carys Chainey: A human-centred approach to improving parenting support training (PDF, 125.9 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Evidence-based parenting support (EBPS) can improve outcomes for families, but its impact depends on training that builds practitioners’ skills and confidence. Training needs to be easy to understand, relevant to practice, engaging, and responsive to practitioners’ needs.

Dr Carys Chainey: Parenting under pressure: Understanding and improving support for families experiencing cumulative adversity (PDF, 125.6 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Families may experience multiple, interconnected adversities, including mental health conditions, problematic substance use, domestic and family violence, incarceration, relationship breakdown, poverty and housing insecurity. These pressures can affect parenting, child development and families' ability to find and use helpful support.

Dr Leah Sharman: Making Sense of Social Change: Analysing Data from the Queensland Social Prescribing Trial (PDF, 243.9 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Social prescribing is a holistic approach to addressing loneliness, social isolation, and low community integration. The Qld Social Prescribing Trial is currently running in 10 Neighbourhood and Community Centres across Queensland and will be ending in December 2026. The Trial is funded by the Department of Communities under the Putting Qld Kids First initiative and the Department of Families (Qld).

Dr Sam Armstrong: Rhythms of Readiness: Brain Stimulation and Movement Preparation (PDF, 118.2 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Before we move, the human motor system is already preparing to act. This preparatory processing is shaped by our expectations, such as when we anticipate needing to respond and which response will be required. During this anticipatory period, brain activity rises and falls in a slow rhythm. Whether this activity actively aids or merely accompanies preparation is not yet known.

Dr Sam Armstrong: Timing Cues and Movement Preparation (PDF, 111.1 KB)

In the moments before a movement, activity in the human motor system builds up in preparation to act. This build-up is usually described as a gradual ramp, but it may instead be a slow wave that rises and falls at a regular rate. Recordings of brain activity alone cannot separate these two possibilities, so whether motor preparation ramps or oscillates is not yet known.

Scholar Positions Available 1

Dr Zoe Walter: Social identity and addiction: Building group-based pathways to recovery (PDF, 132.3 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Addiction is increasingly understood as shaped not only by individual factors but by group memberships, social identities, and the social contexts people move through across the addiction cycle from vulnerability, initiation, escalation/dependency, and recovery/relapse.

Dr Sarah Grainger: A meta-analytic review of the relationship between social cognition and social connectedness across the lifespan (PDF, 124.9 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Social connectedness is important for health and well-being at all stages of the lifespan. Social cognitive abilities refer to our capacity to attend to, detect, and understand social information, and are thought to be fundamental for broader social connectedness. However, there are a number of studies that have examined the relationship between social cognition and social connectedness and the findings appear to be mixed. It’s also unclear whether social cognition and social connectedness are more strongly linked at earlier or later stages of the adult lifespan.

Dr Sarah Grainger: Measuring real world social attention in younger and older adults using mobile eye-tracking (PDF, 124.4 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Social connection plays a crucial role in health and well-being across the lifespan. Social cognition refers to the capacity to attend to, detect, and understand socially relevant information, and are fundamental to effective social interaction. It is therefore concerning that a large body of research suggests that many social cognitive abilities decline with advancing age. However, much of this research has relied on highly artificial laboratory tasks that may not reflect how social cognition actually operates during real-world interactions.

Dr Kirsten Way: Improving Psychosocial Risk Assessment in Australian Workplaces (PDF, 197.3 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Psychosocial hazards such as excessive job demands, bullying, poor support, sexual harassment, and exposure to traumatic events can have serious consequences for worker health, wellbeing, and organisational performance. Identifying these hazards is a critical first step in preventing psychological and physical harm at work.

Dr Kirsten Way: Improving the Health and Safety of Trade Apprentices in Australia (PDF, 141.1 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Trade apprentices play a critical role in Australia's workforce, combining paid employment with structured training while developing skills and experience in high-risk industries. Despite this, apprentices experience disproportionately high rates of workplace injury and illness, and relatively little is known about the workplace, psychosocial, and system-level factors that contribute to these outcomes.

Dr Radhika Tanksale: Collaborate with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students at UQ to co-create components of Sharper Minds, a preventative, mental health promotion package (PDF, 132.8 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Many university students know what helps them feel well, such as getting good sleep, staying hydrated and well nourished, staying connected with others, or managing stress, but this doesn't always translate into everyday habits. This gap can affect both wellbeing and academic success.

Dr Marjolein Kammers: Therapeutic approaches for Loss in Pregnancy (PDF, 124 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Pregnancy loss can have a significant and sometimes long-lasting emotional impact, including grief, anxiety, depression and trauma. However, there is still limited guidance about which psychological and therapeutic approaches or assessment are most appropriate for people following pregnancy loss. This project will explore the existing evidence for psychological interventions and assessment following pregnancy loss.

A/Prof Nik Steffens: Developing leadership to enhance team functioning and well-being (PDF, 131.6 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Leadership plays a critical role in shaping whether teams thrive or operate poorly. Traditional and popular accounts of leadership are often based on assumptions that leadership is a product of fixed qualities possessed by special individuals, despite substantial evidence challenging these assumptions (for this reason, they have also been referred to as ‘zombie leadership’ beliefs). The social identity approach provides a fundamentally different perspective: effective leadership is not about individual leaders (‘me’ or ‘you’), but a social group process revolving around creating, representing, advancing, and embedding a sense of 'us'. A growing body of research suggests that this form of identity leadership can support engagement, performance, team functioning, and well-being.

Prof Gail Robinson: Promoting social information processing with prefrontal neuromodulation: a pilot study (PDF, 136.7 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Successful social interaction relies on effective social information processing. However, some people experience difficulties in this area, and we still know relatively little about how best to support social information processing. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been proposed as a potential approach to improve social information processing, but it remains unclear how it should be applied to produce beneficial effects.

Dr Elizabeth Beadle: Who am I after brain injury? Mapping identity, adjustment and recovery after acquired brain injury (PDF, 134.6 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Acquired brain injury (ABI), including traumatic brain injury and stroke, can change much more than a person’s physical or cognitive abilities. It can also disrupt a person’s sense of who they are, their relationships, roles, belonging and expectations for the future. Changes to identity are increasingly recognised as an important part of adjustment and psychological wellbeing after brain injury, but the research literature is diverse and has not yet been brought together in a way that readily informs clinical practice.

Dr Jacob Sorbello: Summarising and Preparing a Narrative Literature Review on Alcohol and Drug Preloading (PDF, 134.5 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Preloading is an emerging and nuanced alcohol and drug consuming behaviour. Most young people refer to the behaviour as ‘pres’, which typically involves drinking alcohol or using drugs before a night-out. Over the past 20 years there has been a large research interest toward understanding this behaviour in young people and the general public. The last review conducted by Foster and Ferguson (2014) examined the research findings from 2006 – 2013, and the research literature is due for an update.

Dr Tianze Sun: What’s the impact of ChatGPT on substance use beliefs? (PDF, 130.3 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

People are increasingly turning to mainstream AI chatbots such as ChatGPT for information on alcohol, smoking, vaping and other drugs. But we know very little about how AI is being used for drug and health-related info, what’s beneficial, and where they may create new risks. This project explore the role AI may play in shaping beliefs about drugs. Students may contribute to a variety of studies on this topic.

Dr Tianze Sun: Help Shape Better Health Messages: Understanding Vaping and Cessation Needs Among Priority Populations (PDF, 136.3 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Vaping is an emerging public health concern, particularly among populations that may not be adequately reached by mainstream cessation initiatives, including Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) communities and people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). These groups may experience distinct social, cultural, behavioural, and healthcare-related barriers to quitting.

Dr Shamsi Shekari Soleimanloo: Drug Driving and Impairment: From Experimental Data to Six Research Papers (PDF, 139.2 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Drug-driving remains a major road-safety challenge because roadside drug tests primarily identify whether a substance is present, rather than whether a driver is actually impaired. This Australian Government-funded project is developing and evaluating a two-tier enforcement approach that combines broader drug detection with a behavioural measure of driving impairment. The research includes controlled alcohol testing, prescription-medication, illicit-drug and control groups, a traffic-conflict perception test, driving-simulator performance, cognitive measures, sleep monitoring and stakeholder consultation.

Dr Fiona Maccallum: Modelling grief and trauma: A review of computational and quantitative approaches (PDF, 138.2 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Mental health researchers increasingly use computational and quantitative modelling approaches to understand how psychological difficulties develop and are maintained. These methods can range from analyses of intensive longitudinal data, such as daily diary and ecological momentary assessment studies, through to computer simulations that test how psychological processes interact over time. These approaches offer new ways to evaluate and refine theoretical models of grief, trauma, and adaptation to major life events, and potentially identifying modifiable mechanism to improve outcomes for those who are struggling.

Dr Beth OGorman: An exploration of incel-type beliefs – does virginity and sexual success metrics matter? (PDF, 127.9 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

It is widely assumed that a lack of sexual success plays a significant role in the adherence to/endorsement of beliefs that are associated with the online “incel” (i.e., involuntary celibate) community. However, while incels have received increasing attention in the last few years, no quantifiable measure of incel-type beliefs currently exists.

Dr Michael Thai: A license to do wrong: Are wrongdoers with a past history of victimisation evaluated more leniently? (PDF, 142.9 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Why do people sometimes excuse wrongdoing? One factor may be whether the wrongdoer is perceived as having suffered hardship themselves. This project examines whether individuals who have a history of victimisation are evaluated more leniently after committing an wrongdoing, and the psychological processes that may drive these judgements.

Dr Harriet Dempsey Jones: Shaping the Sense of Touch: Exploring Brain Plasticity in the Somatosensory Cortex (PDF, 131.8 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

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/ or run behavioural experiments testing how simple interventions, such as tactile training or synchronous finger stimulation, can improve or disrupt touch perception.

Dr Charlotte Keenan: Sexual Harassment in Correctional Workplaces: An Integrative Review (PDF, 127.1 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Workplace sexual harassment remains a persistent problem across many industries, despite increasing efforts to prevent and address it. The issue can be particularly prominent in male-dominated workplaces, including correctional settings, where workplace culture, gender dynamics, organisational practices, and broader social norms may contribute to the risk of sexual harassment.

Dr Charlotte Keenan: Digital Performance Management and Gender-Based Violence: Building the Evidence for Safer Workplaces (PDF, 129.5 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Digital technologies are increasingly used to evaluate workers through customer ratings, online reviews, app-based feedback, and other performance management systems. While these tools are intended to improve service quality and performance, they may also create new avenues for gendered abuse, sexual harassment, discriminatory feedback, and unfair evaluations, particularly for women working in client-facing roles.

Dr Kana Imuta: How does accent affect our social interactions? (PDF, 131.7 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

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.

Dr Carolina Gonzalez: Green parenting: Understanding parents’ role in times of climate change (PDF, 125.3 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 3

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 two ongoing research projects focused on the novel concept of green parenting, i.e., parents’ promotion of their children’s pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. 1) Green parenting project, 2) Parents’ resources and climate change and 3) Development and pilot testing of brief intervention and resources for parents on climate change and sustainable practices.

Dr Carolina Gonzalez: Preventing the intergenerational continuation of family violence and child maltreatment (PDF, 122.5 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

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 and 2) Secondary analysis of data from pilot study of intergenerational continuity of child maltreatment.

A/Prof Stef Becker: Eyes in the Sky: How Radio Communication Shapes Pilots’ Visual Attention (PDF, 126.8 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Pilots must monitor complex visual information while simultaneously listening and responding to radio communications. This project examines whether different types of communication, including reading information from instruments, recalling information from memory, and performing calculations, interfere with pilots’ visual attention and flight performance.

Ms Rhiannon Ellem: Understanding the Culture within Australian Residential Colleges: Student Perspectives on Alcohol and Other Drug Harm Minimisation (PDF, 128.4 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Alcohol and other drug (AOD) use is an important health and wellbeing issue for university students, particularly those living in residential colleges. College students experience comparatively high rates of heavy drinking and related harms, highlighting the need for prevention programs that are relevant, engaging and responsive to contemporary college culture.

Dr Hannah Schuurs: Pornography use and addiction: Mapping the evidence base (PDF, 137.2 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Problematic pornography use is often described as a behavioural addiction, but this classification remains contested. Researchers have variously understood it as compulsive sexual behaviour, an impulse-control problem, a coping or emotion-regulation strategy, a habitual behaviour, or distress shaped partly by moral beliefs about pornography. These competing explanations matter because they influence how problematic use is measured, diagnosed and treated.

Prof Thomas Suddendorf: Why did humans evolve to be so cooperative? Exploring theories of human evolution through agent-based modelling (PDF, 141.9 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

The human capacity for cooperation fundamentally underpins our success as a species; however, explaining how we evolved to be so cooperative remains a conundrum within evolutionary psychology. Specifically, evolution is supposed to be an inherently selfish process where individuals ruthlessly compete with one another for survival, and it isn’t clear how ‘selfish’ evolution could give rise to extremely cooperative organisms like humans. While researchers have proposed numerous mechanisms (e.g., group selection, within-group reciprocity, cultural evolution) which could potentially have allowed our ancestors to overcome evolution’s ‘selfish’ characteristics, these ideas are currently little more than speculation due to our inability to directly observe or measure our evolutionary past.

Dr Ally Jones: Creating digital tasks to capture children’s mental time travel (PDF, 125.7 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Humans have a unique capacity to mentally re-visit the past and pre-visit the future which allows us to imagine many ways the future may transpire and how past events could have happened differently. This ability supports learning, planning, decision-making and navigating social situations. Over the years, developmental researchers have explored when this capacity develops, but we still know relatively little about how individual differences shape this ability and how this may differ across cultures.

Prof Winnifred Louis: Digital media content collaboration (PDF, 137.5 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 5

This project is for journalism/communications students, or those with journalism/communication experience, to collaborate with us to develop/progress a podcast/vodcast, blog or other social media translating research findings for a community audience. We will accept up to 6 students. 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 (SCL).

Prof Winnifred Louis: Literature Review & Infographic (PDF, 299.3 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 5

The project will focus on a specific topic relevant to the research areas covered by researchers in the Social Change Lab, which broadly cover themes of peace, democracy and human rights, and environmental sustainability. You will be asked to explore and engage previous research on the topic and involves looking at the psychological research as well as interdisciplinary research in other areas.

Prof Winnifred Louis: Plastic-Free UQ: Systems Mapping and Pathways for Change (PDF, 143.2 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 4

Plastic pollution is a significant environmental challenge, and universities have an important role to play in reducing waste and supporting more sustainable practices. While many organisations aspire to become “plastic free”, achieving the full goal and/or making progress with first steps, such as ending single-use plastic use on campus, or ending plastic water bottles, requires understanding the complex systems, behaviours, policies, incentives, and stakeholders that influence plastic use across an institution.

Dr Jon Redshaw: How much self-control does it take to delay gratification? (PDF, 131.4 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

The amount of self-control and agency a person is thought to have can determine how much freedom they are afforded by society, how heavily they are punished, and how public service initiatives approach behaviour-change interventions. Sound measures of self-control are therefore necessary to make appropriate judgements about how to interpret and respond to behavioural outcomes.

Prof Eric Vanman: What Do People Actually Do When They Talk to a Robot? Coding Video-Recorded Interactions with an AI (PDF, 118.2 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

When people interact with an artificial agent, what do they actually do? Do they smile, laugh, lean in, and make eye contact the way they would with a person, or do they treat the exchange as operating a machine? And does that depend on whether the agent has a body, or on what people believe is behind it?

Prof Eric Vanman: Building the Social Continuum Study: Video Stimuli and a Behavioural Measure of Trust in Artificial Agents (PDF, 118.1 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

When do people treat a machine as a social being, and do they trust its advice appropriately? Our lab studies how humans respond to robots and artificial agents, from friendly humanoid robots like NAO to disembodied voice assistants.

Dr Janni Leung: Understanding Cannabis Use: Epidemiology, Patterns and Health Impacts (PDF, 120.6 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Cannabis use is changing across populations, products and policy environments. Robust epidemiological evidence is needed to understand who uses cannabis, how patterns of use differ, which factors are associated with use and harm, and where evidence remains uncertain.

Dr Janni Leung: Estimating the Health Impact of Loneliness (PDF, 120.8 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Loneliness is an important social and public health concern, but estimating its overall health impact is challenging. Studies use different definitions, measures, populations, outcomes and analytical approaches, which can lead to estimates that are difficult to compare.

Dr Janni Leung: Mapping the Relationship Between Substance Use Disorders and Mental Disorders (PDF, 120.6 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Substance use disorders and mental disorders frequently occur together, yet their relationship can vary by condition, population and setting. Clear evidence about patterns of co-occurrence, possible pathways, and associated health and social impacts is essential for prevention, service planning and treatment.

Dr Janni Leung: Understanding Video Game Addiction, Digital Life and Online Behaviours (PDF, 121.1 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Video games and digital platforms are now central to many people's daily lives. Problematic patterns of engagement, including video game addiction, can intersect with broader online behaviours and health, but definitions, measures and findings vary.

Dr Shalini Gautam: How do children reason about moral and social situations? (PDF, 137 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

This project seeks to examine how children reason about social situations and make social judgments. As adults, we often consider many factors when making social judgments. For example, we might consider whether someone had a choice over what they did, or if they intended for a particular outcome to occur. If we reason that someone had no choice, or the outcome occurred by accident, we may be more forgiving or less likely to attribute blame.

Dr Daniel Stjepanovic: Why do some drink and others don’t? A neurodivergent perspective. (PDF, 120.7 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Substance use in neurodivergent populations is often overlooked. Autistic individuals, for example, are less likely to drink. But when they do, their drinking is more likely to lead to problems.

Dr Kristy Armitgae: The optimality of young children’s cognitive offloading (PDF, 115.7 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Cognitive offloading - the use of physical action to alter information processing requirements of a task to reduce cognitive demand – typically entails value-based decision-making. When choosing whether to offload, we weigh anticipated costs (time, physical effort) against anticipated benefits (improved performance, reduced cognitive load). Being able to do this optimally, without systematic biases towards the use of internal or external sources, may be particularly important amidst concerns about potential consequences of over-reliance on cognitive offloading in the digital age.

Dr Jess Taubert: What do our pupils reveal about how we evaluate strangers? (PDF, 147.3 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Faces provide a rich source of social information. Within a fraction of a second, we form impressions of strangers that alter how we behave towards them. Yet much of what we know about face perception comes from highly controlled photographs of people deliberately posing stereotypical emotions.

Prof Fiona Barlow: Bringing Euro-Sexo to Australia: Establishing an Australian Survey of the Sexology Workforce

Scholar Positions Available 1

Sexology is the scientific study of human sexuality, and sexologists are the professionals (clinicians, educators, researchers, and therapists) who work in this field, often supporting people with sexual health, function, or wellbeing concerns. Sexology as a profession varies widely across countries in terms of how practitioners are trained, how they practise, and how they conceptualise their professional identity. The Euro-Sexo survey has been conducted in a number of European countries, surveying sexologists about their training and experiences. Australia currently has no equivalent picture of its own sexology/sex therapist workforce.

Prof Fiona Barlow: What makes people become racist, or reject racism? (PDF, 118.1 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Recent efforts at reducing racism through things like contact interventions (where people come into contact with members of other groups) have largely failed. This raises the question of exactly what it is that reliably changes people’s racial attitudes. In the present study we ask adults to tell us in their own words what they think led them to change their social attitudes.

A/Prof Ada Kritikos: Keeping the Beat, Staying on Your Feet: Investigating the Cognitive and Movement Benefits of Music and Drumming for Falls Prevention (PDF, 155.2 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Falls/falls risk is a growing problem not only globally, but for the Australian nation. The number of Australians aged 65 years or over has risen from 15.1% in 2015 to 15.9% or 3.9 million people in 2019 (ABS, 2019). This research addresses the cognitive processing issues associated with falls/falls risk with research evidence for cognitive and behavioural enhancements in these areas stemming from instrumental music training, and particularly drumming. We are investigating how drumming training hones cognitive and whole-body movement abilities that are vital to preventing falls.

Dr Crystal La Rue: Who am I now? Understanding social identity process in the transition to parenthood (PDF, 113.6 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 1

Becoming a parent is one of life’s biggest transitions. Alongside the practical changes that come with caring for a new baby, new parents can experience profound changes in their sense of self. An important part of this sense of self comes from the social groups we belong to, our social identities. The Social Identity Model of Identity Change (SIMIC) suggests that staying connected to important groups while also building new group connections can help people adjust to life change, provided these existing and new groups are compatible with one another.

A/Prof Courtney von Hippel: Understanding Employees Everyday Stress at Work (PDF, 152.2 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Workplace stress is common, but employees can experience very different kinds of stressful events, from excessive workloads and time pressure to interpersonal conflict, difficult interactions with managers or clients, and mistakes or unexpected problems. Understanding what kinds of events employees find stressful, and whether people respond differently to different types of stressors, can help us better understand how everyday workplace experiences affect employee wellbeing.

Prof Jason Tangen: Can an AI tell good thinking from good writing? Building the dataset to find out (PDF, 123 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Universities are starting to use AI to mark student work, but we still don’t know very well what those marks are actually measuring. AI can look quite good on tasks such as maths, where there is often a clear right or wrong answer. It’s much harder to judge work that depends on reasoning, interpretation or explanation. One concern is that an AI marker may reward long, fluent, confident writing even when the thinking underneath it is weak.

Dr Callyn Farrell: Loneliness and Connectedness: Understanding Children’s Social Worlds (PDF, 147.8 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Loneliness is increasingly recognised as an important developmental issue, with links to poorer mental health, reduced academic engagement, and longer-term wellbeing challenges. Although often associated with older adults, loneliness is also common in childhood and adolescence and may peak during the teenage years. Importantly, loneliness is not simply the absence of social contact. From a Social Identity Approach to Health perspective, it can reflect a lack of meaningful group memberships and identification.

Dr Callyn Farrell: Talking with Children: Language, Gender and Social Understanding (PDF, 149.6 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

How children learn to understand other people’s thoughts, emotions, identities, and social differences is a central question in developmental psychology. One important influence is the language children hear from adults. Mental state language (MSL)—talk about thoughts, emotions, desires, and beliefs—and more elaborated forms of conversation can support children’s developing understanding of minds and social relationships. However, adults do not necessarily talk to all children in the same way.

Dr Tianyi Ma: Can Parents’ Confidence Shape Parenting? Exploring Parental Self-Efficacy and Parenting Practices (PDF, 131.4 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

How confident parents feel in their ability to manage parenting challenges may influence how they interact with and respond to their children. This belief, known as parental self-efficacy, has been studied extensively, but research has produced a wide range of findings and has used many different measures and definitions of parenting practices.

Dr Tianyi Ma: Can Parents’ Confidence Affect Family Wellbeing? Exploring Parental Self-Efficacy and Mental Health Outcomes in Parents and Children (PDF, 133.1 KB)

Scholar Positions Available 2

Being a parent can be rewarding, but it can also involve substantial challenges. One factor that may shape how parents and children cope with these challenges is parental self-efficacy—parents’ beliefs about their ability to successfully manage parenting tasks and respond to their children’s needs.