Experimental and Social Psychology Research Group (EASY)

Our research predominantly takes an experimental approach to address questions of relevance to cognitive and social psychology. With a strong focus on experimental design to identify causal relationships our work addresses questions relating to social cognition, imitation, empathy, theory of mind, emotion, motivations, decision making, and learning. We use methods from experimental psychology, social psychology, associative learning and cognitive neuroscience to address questions including;

Why do emotions shape social behaviour?
Why do individuals differ when learning to be afraid?
Does seeing the bigger picture make us happy?
How do individual difference in motivations modulate cognition?
What it the neutral basis of social interaction?
Why do people not engage in behaviours that are good for their health?
Can we make people make better decisions?

Members

Michael Aitken

Professor of Experimental Psychology

Andreea Andone Zaman

PhD Student

Nicola Byrom

Senior Lecturer in Psychology

Caroline Catmur

Senior Lecturer

Shilei Chen

PhD Student

Ellie Dommett

Reader in Neuroscience

Myanna Duncan

Lecturer

Benjamin Gardner

Senior Lecturer

Alexandra Livia Georgescu

Lecturer in Psychology

Salim Hashmi

Teaching Fellow, BSc Psychology

Samuel Keightley

PhD Student & Psychology Demonstrator

Dan Kennedy-Higgins

Teaching Fellow in Psychology

Divyush Khemka

PhD student

Aysenur Kilic

PhD Student

Qazi Rahman

Senior Lecturer

Tim Rakow

Reader in Psychology

Oliver Runswick

Lecturer in Performance Psychology

Charlotte Russell

Senior Lecturer

Sahana Shankar

Research Student

Yuen Yan Tam

Research Student

Helena Zavos

Lecturer in Psychology

Does seeing the bigger picture make us happy?

Positive Psychology suggests that a broad attentional breadth contributes to a positive mood and vice versa. Dr Nicola Byrom et al. are testing the hypothesis that the link between attentional breadth and positive mood is mediated by associative learning. When we learn associations between stimulus in the world around us and the outcomes they predict, we can learn one of two types of associations; associations can be elemental or configural. With elemental associations we learn, we learn about the relationships between each individual component or a stimulus and the outcome is it paired with. With configural associations, we learn about the relationship between a configural whole of the stimulus and the outcome it is paired with. Our previous research indicates that individuals with narrow breadth of attention are likely to encode elemental associations; rather than configural association (the rel. In this project, we are testing mood, attention breadth and associative learning through a set of computerized tasks to assess the relationship between these factors.

Mirror Intentions? Establishing the contribution of mirror neurons to action understanding

Led by Caroline Catmur, this project addresses a fundamental question in social neuroscience research: whether mirror neurons – brain cells that fire when we perform an action, and also when seeing someone else performing the same action – enable us to understand the intentions behind other people’s actions.

Flexible Brain Training- Can we train more flexible information processing and is it helpful?

Fatigue can be a very difficult and debilitating symptom to live with. It can have a big impact on day to day life, including how we engage with the world. To manage fatigue, some people develop certain ways of processing information. For example, skim reading or predicting future energy levels. These are types of mental ‘short-cuts’ our brain makes. These ways of processing can be helpful, such as in helping to manage everyday tasks and planning to do activities when most able. However, by continually using these ‘short-cuts’ our brain gets used to following the same path and the ‘short-cuts’ can become automatic. So, rather than apply different ways of processing information, taking different paths- our brains become reliant on the same one. This can be unhelpful, for example when the situation changes, or an unexpected event occurs. This research, led by Alicia Hughes, is designed to assess whether we can (1) change how the brain deals with or processes information and (2) whether training the brain in more flexible processing is helpful for people with fatigue.

Investigating the effects of cardio and non-cardio exercise on adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a prevalent development condition, affecting 6% of children. However, it is now recognised that it affects an estimated 3% of adults and treatment options for adults with the condition are more limited than those for children. Preliminary research suggests that exercise may be an effective treatment. However, to date, there has been little or no controlled experiments to examine the effects of exercise, even acutely, on core symptoms of ADHD that is inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity. This research project, funded by the Rosetrees Trust, examines the effects of cardio (cycling) and non-cardio exercise (yoga) on ADHD symptoms in adults with ADHD and those without.

How can we reduce sedentary behaviour in the workplace?

Led by Dr Benjamin Gardner, This project adopts a social psychology perspective to understand the significance of sedentary behaviour (i.e. sitting) to office workers. While many studies have been undertaken to trial methods of reducing sitting time in the workplace, few have sought to understand the psychological, interpersonal and organisational structures that sustain sitting at work. This project incorporates a number of studies that seek to understand the social psychology of workplace sitting, and how it may frame sitting-reduction campaigns.

What’s in a ‘habit’? Understanding the concept of habit and its application to everyday behaviour

Habitual behaviours are automatically elicited by situations in which they have consistently been performed in the past. The habit concept is not new; over 150 years of research, predominantly arising from animal learning studies, have shown the potential for habit to determine our actions. Yet, applications of habit to explain complex human actions have lacked coherence, and do not resonate with common experiences of behaviour. Is it possible, for example, to do ’30 minutes of moderate physical activity’ entirely habitually? This long-term theoretical project, led by Dr Benjamin Gardner, seeks to develop more coherent accounts of how habit manifests in everyday behaviours, with a view to informing development of more effective behaviour change interventions. 

Making medical data comprehensible

There is a wealth of data available from healthcare systems, which patients may seek to use when making decisions about medical treatment for themselves or for family members. However, this information is often only available in formats that are difficult to understand, or which are open to misinterpretation. In a series of recent and on-going projects, led by Dr Tim Rakow, we use experiments to test how changing the format of data displays alters people’s understanding of the information that they show, and how this influences their impression of the options open to them

Experiential choice

Many everyday decisions involve uncertainty (we do not know exactly how each course of action will turn out) but can be informed by past experience of similar decisions (e.g., what happened last time). This on-going line of experimental research investigates the influences on such ‘decisions from experience’.

How does increasing motivation enhance cognition?

Lead Researcher: Charlotte Russell - charlotte.russell@kcl.ac.uk Evidence suggests that boosting motivation can enhance cognitive processes such as attention and memory. This research, led by Dr Charlotte Russell explored a number of questions: What is ‘motivation’? For example, is the effect of financial incentive in a task stronger than the effect of experimental manipulations of curiosity? Does performance enhancement by increased motivation change according to individual differences? For example, are older people less motivated by financial reward as compared to social motivations? Are there differential motivation effects across cognitive domains? For example, what is the difference between motivation strategies in attention versus long-term episodic memory?

How does episodic memory change with age?

Episodic memory, our memory for personally experienced events, is an essential process yet it develops late in childhood and, unfortunately, declines relatively early in ageing. We are examining how this type of memory changes in age. For example, a crucial aspect of recalling an episodic event is that when we remember we re-create a mental image of the event from the perspective in which we experienced it – our first-person or self-perspective.  This project, led by Dr Charlotte Russell, examines whether difficulties in creating this first-person mental image is an early indicator of age related memory decline and examining interventions to circumvent some of this change utilising neurostimulation and anticipated reward.

Context and task effects in sensitivity to losses and other decision phenomena

Loss aversion, the observation that 'losses loom larger than gains' in people's decisions, is assumed to be a standard feature of people's decision making. However, recent work suggests that this phenomenon is much less stable than previously thought. In keeping with this, Dr Tim Rakow is exploring the circumstances under which loss aversion reduces, disappears and even reverses as a function of changes to the task and the environment that the decision maker encounters. I am also interested in similar context and task effects for other features of our decision making.