Please read through the list of available fourth year projects. Please take note of the project number as you will need these to complete the selection form. You will receive an email reminder in the first week of January. If you have any questions please direct them to fourthyear-psych@unimelb.edu.au

• Professor Charles Abraham

  A Systematic Review of the effectiveness of computer-delivered alcohol interventions (CDAIs) targeting undergraduate students

  Project Number: 101 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  Use of computer- or web-based technology to disseminate health interventions has a number of advantages including cost-effectiveness, ability to reach large audiences, increased anonymity and improved flexibility (Rhodes, Bowie, & Hergenrather, 2003; Ritterband et al., 2003; Taylor & Luce, 2003). Moreover, computer-delivered alcohol interventions (CDAIs) are shown to be preferred among university students when compared to practitioner-delivered interventions (Kypri, Saunders, & Gallagher, 2003). Evaluations of CDAIs designed to reduce excessive alcohol consumption among students have been reviewed (e.g. Barnett & Read, 2005; Carey, Scott-Sheldon, Carey, & DeMartini, 2007; Labbe & Maisto, 2011; Larimer & Cronce, 2002; Platt et al, 2015, Reid & Carey, 2015; Samson & Tanner-Smith, 2015; Seigers & Carey, 2011). These reviews reveal heterogeneity of target group, intervention content, delivery mode, duration and number of follow-ups. A systematic search of recent reviews and of more recent evaluative studies (not included in these reviews) will be undertaken. Effect sizes will be examined and sub-group analyses undertaken to investigate which intervention work best for whom. Where possible, meta analyses will be conducted to ascertain the overall effectiveness of CDAIs with a student population and examine under which circumstances this effectiveness may vary. In other words, what works, in what context for whom?

  Readings

  Barnett, N. P., & Read, J. P. (2005). Mandatory alcohol intervention for alcohol-abusing college students: A systematic review. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, 29(2), 147–158. doi:doi: 10.1016/j.jsat.2005.05.007

  Carey, K. B., Scott-Sheldon, L. A. J., Carey, M. P., & DeMartini, K. S. (2007). Individual-level interventions to reduce college student drinking: A meta-analytic review. Addictive Behaviors, 32(11), 2469–2494. doi:doi: 10.1016/j.addbeh.2007.05.004

  Carey, K. B., Scott-Sheldon, L. A. J., Elliott, J. C., Bolles, J. R., & Carey, M. P. (2009). Computer-delivered interventions to reduce college student drinking: a meta-analysis. Addiction, 104(11), 1807–1819. doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2009.02691.x House of commons health committee. (2010). Alcohol. Retrieved May 28, 2012, from http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmhealth/151/15116.htm

  Kypri, K., Saunders, J. B., & Gallagher, S. J. (2003). ACCEPTABILITY OF VARIOUS BRIEF INTERVENTION APPROACHES FOR HAZARDOUS DRINKING AMONG UNIVERSITY STUDENTS. Alcohol and Alcoholism, 38(6), 626 –628. doi:10.1093/alcalc/agg121

  Labbe, A. K., & Maisto, S. A. (2011). Alcohol expectancy challenges for college students: A narrative review. Clinical Psychology Review, 31(4), 673–683. doi:doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2011.02.007

  Larimer, M. E., & Cronce, J. M. (2002). Identification, prevention and treatment: A review of individual-focused strategies to reduce problematic alcohol consumption by college students. Journal of Studies on Alcohol (Supplement No. 14), 148–163.

  Platt L, Melendez-Torres GJ, O'Donnell A, et al. (2016). How effective are brief interventions in reducing alcohol consumption: do the setting, practitioner group and content matter? Findings from a systematic review and metaregression analysis BMJ Open 2016;6:e011473. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2016-011473

  Rhodes, S. D., Bowie, D. A., & Hergenrather, K. C. (2003). Collecting behavioural data using the world wide web: considerations for researchers. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 57(1), 68 –73. doi:10.1136/jech.57.1.68

  Reid, A. E. & Carey, K. B. (2015). Interventions to reduce college student drinking: State of the evidence for mechanisms of behavior change. Clinical Psychology Review, 40:213-24. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2015.06.006.

  Ritterband, L. M., Gonder-Frederick, L. A., Cox, D. J., Clifton, A. D., West, R. W., & Borowitz, S. M. (2003). Internet interventions: In review, in use and into the future. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 34(5), 527–534.

  Samson, J. F. & Tanner-Smith, E E. (2015). Single-Session Alcohol Interventions for Heavy Drinking College Students: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 76(4): 530–543.

  Seigers, D. K. L., & Carey, K. B. (2011). Screening and Brief Interventions for Alcohol Use in College Health Centers: A Review. Journal of American College Health, 59(3), 151–158. doi:doi: 10.1080/07448481.2010.502199

  
  

  How is Alcohol Consumption Represented in the Movies?

  Project Number: 102 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  There is evidence to suggest that watching movies that depict alcohol consumption may promote drinking (Dal Cin et al, 2009; Hanewinkel et al 2014). However, there have been few studies of how exactly alcohol consumption is depicted in different movie genres over time. This study will undertake a content analysis (Krippendorf, 2013) of the depiction of alcohol in movies. A set of popular movies will be purposively selected. These will represent movie making over time and across genres and include movies that especially highlight alcohol use (e.g., Sideway and see https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/gallery/big-screen-booze-15-movies-598102/1-the-worlds-end).
  
  A coding framework will be created to identify similarities and differences in how alcohol consumption is represented. This will then be applied to the movie selection to provide a numerical characterisation of alcohol consumption in film.
  
  Readings
  
  Dal Cin, S., Worth, K. A., Gerrard, M., Stoolmiller, M., Sargent, J. D., Wills, T. A., & Gibbons, F. X. (2009). Watching and drinking: expectancies, prototypes, and friends' alcohol use mediate the effect of exposure to alcohol use in movies on adolescent drinking. Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association, 28(4), 473-83.
  Krippendorf, K. (2013 3rd ed.) Content Analysis; An Introduction to its Methodology. Sage.
  Reiner Hanewinkel, James D. Sargent, Kate Hunt, Helen Sweeting, Rutger C.M.E. Engels, Ron H.J. Scholte, Federica Mathis, Ewa Florek, Matthis Morgenstern (2014) Portrayal of Alcohol Consumption in Movies and Drinking Initiation in Low-Risk Adolescents. Paediatrics, 133, issue 6 (http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/133/6/973)
• Dr Jacqueline Anderson

  Neurocognition and functioning 15 years after a first episode of psychosis

  Project Number: 111 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: Data collection will be carried out at Orygen Youth Health in Parkville.
  
  

  Co-supervisors: Prof Sue Cotton, Dr Amity Watson Location of research: Orygen Youth Health: Health Services and Outcomes Research

  Description: Psychotic disorders including non-affective (schizophrenia) and affective (bipolar) psychoses are associated with neuropsychological cognitive deficits. Evidence suggests that such deficits are present in first presentation psychosis and are associated with poorer functioning, such as employment outcomes. It is unclear the extent that these changes are evident over the long-term. This study will involve examination of a unique cohort of individuals that were treated for a first episode psychosis 15 years ago at the Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Service. Participants are currently being recruited to this study with over 100 being interviewed. Ethics approval for this study has been already obtained, so only the addition of a student on the project will be required for ethics. The project can take a number of directions including comparing this cohort to individuals at the first episode of psychosis and predictors of cognition over the long-term. It is expected that the student will assist with the collection of neuropsychological data for a normal healthy control group.

• Professor Vicki Anderson

  Identification of blood markers of delayed concussion in children

  Project Number: 121 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is defined as “an alteration in brain function, or other evidence of brain pathology, caused by an external force”. Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is one of the most common forms of TBI and accounts for one out of every 220 paediatric patients admitted to the emergency department within the United States, totalling approximately 144,000 patients per year on a national level and 18% of all paediatric head injury patients.
  An audit of children who attended the Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH), Melbourne, Australia in 2004 for a head injury found that 90% of the patients were classified as a mTBI. While most children improve within one week following a mTBI, there is growing consensus that symptoms can persist for up to one month in approximately 30% of patients, with approximately 40% of individuals remaining symptomatic 2 weeks post-injury. This differs significantly from that of adults, a population which sees most individuals recover within a 2 week period. These prolonged symptoms, which may include headaches, dizziness, difficulties concentrating, irritability, cognitive/emotional impairments, and behavioural difficulties carry the potential to develop into significant cognitive, academic and emotional-behavioural difficulties if left unchecked. The last decade has seen a progressive shift to blood proteome analysis as a means of assisting the determination of clinical diagnosis, prognosis and outcome in the setting of concussion. To date, very few studies have investigated the differential plasma protein expression following paediatric mTBI, and specifically the association of blood proteins with delayed clinical outcomes post-concussion in children.

  We have recently utilized the SWATH-MS analysis to assess changes in expression of up to 400 plasma proteins. This allowed for an unbiased discovery of proteins not yet implicated in concussion research. This project aims to utilize the complex proteomics SWATH-MS dataset to identify plasma proteins associated with delayed clinical outcomes post-concussion in children.

  
  

  Identification of autism symptoms in transgender children and adolescents

  Project Number: 122 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Referrals of transgender children and adolescents for medical care have been increasing exponentially across the Western world. For reasons that remain unclear, there appears to be a much higher prevalence of autism in transgender children compared to the general population. For example, a recent audit of 400 patients at the Royal Children’s Hospital Gender Service in Melbourne indicated that 15.5% have a parent-reported diagnosis of autism, while a further 8.3% are suspected of having autism by their clinicians. In contrast, recent prevalence estimates of autism within the general community are only 1.4%.
  
  Anecdotally, it appears that the vast majority of transgender young people with autism do not have a recognized intellectual disability or language impairment, both of which are usually common in those with autism. This suggests that the nature of autism is intrinsically different in those who are transgender compared to those who are not, but the nature of such differences has not yet been explored.
  
  To address this gap in knowledge, we are undertaking a study of transgender children and adolescents with autism, and are profiling their cognition, communication and social skills using a variety of standardised tools. By comparing these data to that of existing cohorts of young people with autism from the general community, we will be able to better understand the specific strengths and weaknesses of these transgender children. This information should directly inform clinical practice and enable more tailored assessment and treatment of young transgender individuals with autism, whose clinical management is typically more complex.
  
  The opportunity exists for a motivated and passionate student to join this project. The successful candidate will be involved in primary data collection and related statistical analyses not only to fulfil their thesis requirements but also to publish their findings in a relevant scholarly journal.
  
  

  Genetics and Neurodevelopment

  Project Number: 123 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  After decades of research, very little progress has been made into understanding the causes of symptoms seen in children with autism and social impairment. This is partially due to researchers studying the broad population of children diagnosed with autism, which lumps together the many different pathological mechanisms that potentially lead to autism.  However, recent progress in identifying some genes that cause autism is helping researchers start to separate out some of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying autism and social impairment. Our group is offering opportunities for students to be involved in an exciting program of research aiming to better understand the pathways to autism in children with diagnosed genetic syndromes, such as neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1). For each child, we collect neuropsychological information about intelligence, social cognition, executive functioning, psychopathology (e.g., autism and ADHD ratings), and functioning. Older children also undergo state-of-the-art structural and functional neuroimaging enabling us to better understand the psychological and neurobiological factors that contribute to social impairment and autism in children with these genetic syndromes. The scope of the student project will be discussed with supervisors and will fit under the broader umbrella of the research program. Students would need a strong academic track record and an interest in neuropsychology and/or developmental neuroscience. Our team collaborates with other groups within the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute as well as other research institutes, both nationally and internationally.

• Associate Professor Brock Bastian

  Exploring the Moral Catalyst Phenomenon: How One Shocking Event Can Amplify the Condemnation of Less Serious but Related Behaviours.

  Project Number: 131 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  People’s perception regarding the wrongness of certain behaviours are often relative, such that the prevalence of highly problematic behaviours can lead to less condemnation of comparatively less problematic behaviours. For example, an ethically ambiguous study may be perceived as less wrong in an environment where unethical studies are highly prevalent, compared to where there are very few unethical studies (Levari et al., 2018). However, one exception to this finding appears to occur where particular stories of shocking moral violations became highly salient, leading to increased vigilance about the related class of behaviours as a whole. For example, the highly publicised story of sexual misconduct by Harvey Weinstein, not only led to increased condemnation of serious forms of sexual misconduct, but also for less serious forms. In such situations, the salience of serious cases of a behaviour, appear to act as a Moral Catalyst, which actually amplify the condemnation of less serious cases. Projects in this area will explore the contextual factors and psychological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon.

  Levari, D. E., Gilbert, D. T., Wilson, T. D., Sievers, B., Amodio, D. M., & Wheatley, T. (2018). Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgment. Science, 360(6396), 1465-1467. doi:10.1126/science.aap8731

  
  

  Pathways to increasing concern for the natural environment

  Project Number: 132  Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  How and why do people care for the natural environment? What are the pathways through which we can elicit more moral concern. Our work has found that people do think about the natural environment and endangered species as morally relevant, but what are the factors that help to explain why? By uncovering these factors, we have the capacity to develop better interventions that can motivate people to seek to protect natural and even cultural environments. This project could investigate characteristics such as beauty or experiences such as awe as pathways through which people feel connected to, and increase their concern for, nature.
  
  Crimston, D., Bain, P. G., Hornsey, M. J., & Bastian, B. (2016). Moral expansiveness: Examining variability in the extension of the moral world. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(4), 636
  
  Bastian, B., Brewer, M., Duffy, J., & Van Lange, P. A. (2018). From cash to crickets: The non-monetary value of a resource can promote human cooperation. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 61, 10-19.
  
  

  Wellbeing, meaning, and happiness

  Project Number: 133  Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  How do people achieve wellbeing in life? There has been a significant push to focus on our own levels of happiness as a sign that we are doing well in life. Recent research, however, suggests that this may backfire and that chasing happiness, or feeling that others in our society place pressure on us to be happy, can lead to depression and reduced wellbeing. Research suggests that there are different ways that people can approach the pursuit of happiness, and some work better than others. Another possibility is that people may focus less on happiness and pursue meaning instead, explaining why we may often find wellbeing even in contexts that are negative, difficult, or costly. This project would seek to examine the different ways that people pursue wellbeing, what works and what does not work, and whether focusing on our own emotional states may not be the answer after all. There would be room to develop some more specific ideas as part of this project.
  
  Dejonckheere, E., Bastian, B., Fried, E. I., Murphy, S. C., & Kuppens, P. (2017). Perceiving social pressure not to feel negative predicts depressive symptoms in daily life. Depression and anxiety, 34(9), 836-844.
  
  McGuirk, L., Kuppens, P., Kingston, R., & Bastian, B. (2017). Does a culture of happiness increase rumination over failure? Emotion, 18, 755-764.
• Associate Professor Stefan Bode

  The role of physical effort in change-of-mind decisions

  Project Number: 141 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  In everyday life, we often need to update our understanding of the world and adjust our actions accordingly. For example, we may raise our hand to greet a friend, only to abandon this action when we realise that the other person is actually a stranger. Recently, it has been shown that people are less likely to change their mind (i.e. abandon a decision), if a lot of effort is required to do so. However, an outstanding question is whether the amount of effort required to enact an initial decision, affects the likelihood of subsequent changes of mind. This project will investigate the role of perceived physical effort in influencing subsequent change-of-mind decisions in basic perceptual decision-making. There will be the option to gain experience in coding (in MATLAB and R) as well as formal modelling techniques.

  
  

  Does anticipation of relevant information slow down moral judgements?

  Project Number: 142 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  In our everyday life, we often make moral judgements with a dose of hesitance, in particular if we are aware that we may not have all information. For instance, seeing someone push another person, we might hesitate to make a judgement before knowing if this behaviour was offensive or defensive. Recently, it has been shown that people make slower moral judgements of apparently selfish behaviour when there is a possibility that relevant contextual information will be available soon. However, it is not clear whether this slowing might instead reflect a general tendency to be careful when judging apparently selfish actions. In this project we will examine the relationship between morality of actions and response time when participants anticipate that additional contextual information might become available or not. This project will entail learning to code (in Matlab and R), to apply advanced statistical analysis, and optionally, formal modelling techniques.
  
  

  Investigating rapid adjustments in attention following response errors

  Project Number: 143 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: This is an EEG project which might require slightly more time dedicated to data acquisition and analysis than regular projects. However, these steps will be conducted as a team together with another student.
  
  
  In our daily lives, we often make perceptual errors, for example misidentifying an object, or flicking the wrong light switch when we enter a room. We can correct these types of errors very rapidly, and adjust our decision-making strategies to avoid making similar errors in the future. A recent study found that, following an error response, we rapidly shift our attention to stimuli associated with the error. This attention shift helps us respond to future stimuli more accurately, and occurs even before we are conscious of making the error. However, it is still unclear whether these rapid attention adjustments are involved in correcting the error which triggered the attention adjustments in the first place. This project will use electroencephalography (EEG) to track the neural markers of attention shifts in visual cortex following correct responses and errors. The project will also investigate whether EEG measurements relate to the speed of error correction responses. During the project, there will be the opportunity to acquire basic MATLAB skills, and to collect and analyse EEG data.
  
  

  Exploring the relationship between decision confidence and information-seeking in perceptual decision making

  Project Number: 144 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: This is an EEG project which might require slightly more time dedicated to data acquisition and analysis than regular projects. However, these steps will be conducted as a team together with another student.
  
  
  Throughout our daily life we make perceptual decisions with varying levels of certainty. For example, on a rainy day we may be much less certain about the speed of an oncoming car when deciding whether to cross the street. If we are not sufficiently confident in our decisions, we may seek further information (e.g., stare at the oncoming car for longer) to make a better-informed choice. It was recently found that people rapidly increase their attention to task-relevant stimuli after making errors in perceptual decision making tasks. However, it is not yet known whether these attention adjustments reflect error-specific processes, or are simply a case of a decision made with low confidence (prompting information seeking behaviour). This project will investigate the relationship between decision confidence and information seeking following correct and error responses. Electroencephalography (EEG) will be used to track rapid shifts in attention following low-, medium- and high-confidence decisions. During the project, there will be the opportunity to acquire basic MATLAB skills, and to collect and analyse EEG data.
• Professor Stephen Bowden

  Examining aspects of the latent-variable structure of the NUCOG.

  Project Number: 151 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  This project will be undertake with the collaboration and co-supervision of Drs. Kelly Allot, and Shayden Bryce, Orygen Youth Health, and Dr. Charles Malpas, Royal Melbourne Hospital. The NUCOG is a brief screening cognitive assessment recommended for use in a wide variety of settings. Like many such cognitive ‘mental status’ tests, the NUCOG is designed to be used and administered by psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurses, medical practitioners and other allied health practitioners. See http://www.nucog.com.au/index.html This study is intended to extend understanding of the latent structure of the NUCOG by examining confirmatory factor analytic models in a large clinical sample. The study will focus on age-related differences and stability of the factor model through examination of measurement invariance across subgroups The project will suit a student with an aptitude for advanced data modelling and an interest in the diagnostic modelling for clinical assessment. No prior knowledge of the advanced statistical techniques will be assumed and instruction in these techniques will be provided by the supervisors.

  
  

  Reliability of performance validity tests in neuropsychological assessment.

  Project Number: 152 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Performance validity assessment has become an integral part of clinical neuropsychological evaluations. In cognitive assessment, performance validity may be affected by a variety of cognitive disorders, for example dementia, or by comorbid conditions such as depression. Performance validity may also be affected by response sets such as inattention, or by attempts to manipulate the evaluation of impairment. Various free-standing performance validity test (PVT’s) have become popular, for example the Test of Malingered Memory (TOMM: https://www.pearsonclinical.com.au/products/view/204 ) and the Word Memory Test (WMT: https://wordmemorytest.com/word-memory-test/ ). Unfortunately, psychological tests often are adopted for clinical practice before sufficient research is conducted to guide interpretation. One critical aspect of test interpretation is test-retest reliability of which little is known for either of these tests. This study is intended to provide an independent evaluation of the retest reliability of these tests.
  The project will suit a student with an aptitude for advanced data modelling and an interest in the diagnostic modelling for clinical assessment.
  
  

  Latent variable structure of item-level analysis of common cognitive assessment techniques.

  Project Number: 153 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  The Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) model of cognitive abilities has proven very successful at describing the latent-variable structure of diverse cognitive-assessment batteries (see Flanagan & McDonough, 2018). Central to the success of CHC analyses has been the analysis of ‘stratum 2’ or ‘broad’ abilities. Latent variable factor analysis of broad abilities is usually based on composite scores that are derived from summation of many individual test items. The reason for basing factor analysis on composite scores is that, provided the composite scores are derived from trait homogeneous items, then composites will be more reliable and provide a better estimate of the target construct (Strauss & Smith, 2009).

  However, much remains to be understood regarding the item-level and ‘narrow’ structure of the subtest scores that typically contribute to composite scores in cognitive ability assessments. As a consequence, there is much speculation and clinical lore, often unevaluated, regarding the construct validity of specific subtests. To take one example, there is much speculation regarding the abilities involved in digit-span forward scores, versus digit-span backward, a popular hypothesis being that these two tests measure different abilities (see Lezak et al., 2015). However item level CFA suggests that forward and backward digit span do not measure different abilities (Bowden, et al., 2013).
  Using archival data from a large clinical cohort, this project offers the opportunity to evaluate a variety of item-level factor hypotheses including, for example, that Wechsler Memory Scale Verbal Paired Associates (VPA) does not display semantic clustering, that VPA measures something different from prose recall (logical memory), and other hypotheses. Evaluation of these hypotheses has direct implications for interpretation in clinical practice.

  Bowden, S. C., Petrauskas, V. M., Bardenhagen, F. J., Meade, C. E., & Simpson, L. C. (2013). Exploring the dimensionality of digit span. Assessment, 20, 188-198.
• Dr Abi Brooker

  How do caregiver characteristics influence young people’s experiences of mental health services?

  Project Number: 161 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: Two students are required for these projects to proceed – the two students will work together, each extracting data from the medical files of approximately 75 young people. This will result in a dataset of approximately 150 cases. The outcome variables will be divided between the two students.
  
  

  Responsible supervisor: Dr Abi Brooker External Supervisors: Dr Simon Rice & Professor Sue Cotton, Orygen National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health

  Youth depression and suicide are recognised as significant public health challenges. The Youth Mood Clinic – part of Orygen Youth Health’s tertiary youth mental health service – provides early intervention for young people (15 to 25 years) experiencing a severe primary mood disorder (https://oyh.org.au/our-services/clinical-program/continuing-care-teams/youth-mood-clinic). Consistent with guidelines, the Youth Mood Clinic integrates caregivers of young people into the treatment process, via orientation to the service, meetings with the treating team, phone contact and in some cases, provision of time-limited family support (e.g., family-based sessions). Integration of caregivers is viewed as an important component of treatment for severe presentations of youth depression, yet more evidence is needed of the role that caregiver characteristics can play in successful pathways of recovery.

  This fourth-year research project is offered in collaboration with Orygen Youth Health. The specific aim of the project is to investigate the relationship between mental health experiences for youth recently discharged from the Youth Mood Clinic, and characteristics of the young people's caregivers and families. Within that aim, the project involves two separate but closely related research topics. One topic focuses on how caregiver characteristics influence the young persons pathways to referral, and the nature of the episode of care experienced by the young person (e.g., engagement, duration). One topic focuses on the relationship between caregiver engagement with the Youth Mood Clinic and the young persons suicide risk.

  The two proposed topics will undertake an audit of clinical files of young people recently discharged from the Youth Mood Clinic to examine the relationship between caregiver characteristics, caregiver engagement with service, and the young persons experiences of mental health.

  Both project topics will make substantial contributions to understanding the role that family and caregivers play in young people's pathways through treatment, and both projects will assist in informing decision making related to services provided to families by the clinic.

• Associate Professor Christina Bryant

  Health and well-being in midlife

  Project Number: 171 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  This project offers the opportunity to use data from a large longitudinal study of health and well-being, with a particular focus on women in midlife. Data have been collected on a very wide range of variables, including depression, anxiety, subjective well-being, satisfaction with life, prosocial behaviour, growth mindset, mastery and self-compassion, as well as data on lifestyle behaviours such as diet, and physical health measures including menopausal status. Earlier waves of data collection also include measures of personality, attitudes to ageing and life events. The students involved will be able to shape the precise research question in line with their interests, but possible questions could include examination of the relationship between psychological resilience factors, positive physical and mental health behaviours and better adjustment to menopausal symptoms.

• Associate Professor Olivia Carter

  Measuring Consciousness with EEG

  Project Number: 181 Places available for this project: 4
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  A number of research groups around the world have proposed mathematical measures of EEG that claim to quantify an individual’s level of consciousness – “a consciousness meter.” The development of a mathematical measure of consciousness would be of great clinical value, particularly in the context of determining the level of awareness likely being experienced in patients with severe brain trauma (i.e. the extent to which the patient is conscious of anything). However, before such measures can be used in the clinic it is important to determine their reliability, stability and sensitive to fluctuations in consciousness (for example, sleep vs awake) within healthy people. This group of projects will involve analysis of EEG data collected from healthy participants that have had EEG recorded for multiple days continuously. The primary objective of the study will be to investigate the reliability of current consciousness algorithms and test some of the key theoretical assumptions on which they are based.

• Dr Simon Cropper

  Colour preference and eye movements

  Project Number: 191 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  It has been suggested that eye-movements both betray and influence the chosen stimulus in a judgement of facial attractiveness. We were interested in generalising this observation to see whether patterns of eye-movements would change according to the type of decision to be made when faced with a series of binary choices made with the same stimulus set. This project will expand a pilot study completed last year that examined eye movements and colour judgements including discrimination, hue judgements and preference judgements.

  
  

  Time perception

  Project Number: 192 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  An ongoing project in the lab is concerned with the perception of time, particularly at short stimulus durations, and the metacognition of that percept. The project suggested here extends existing studies to examine the role that light level, stimulus modality and colour may have upon the ability to judge brief periods of time. The project will use a single subject psychophysical design.
  
  

  Bodies, Objects and Attention: Does frequent exposure to idealised thin bodies alter our attention and perception?

  Project Number: 193 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  On a daily basis, we are confronted with media representations of "real" people. Even when we know these images could have been distorted, they have the ability to change how we think and feel about ourselves. In particular, frequent exposure to idealised thin female bodies and muscular male bodies can alter how we pay attention to the things in our environment. This project will use a line-bisecion task to determine how the presence of both male and female, thin and nominally-'overweight' bodies changes our lateralised attention. This project is a collaboration with Dr Nicole Thomas at Monash University though the work will be conducted here.
  
  

  Hallucination proneness, sensory processing, and individual differences

  Project Number: 194 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  This collaboration between Luke Smillie and I reflects our converging interests over the past few years. Both labs have recently shown the important role that personality traits and related individual differences play in some of the most basic sensory processes that contribute to cognition (Antinori et al., 2016, 2017; Partos et al, 2016). This project, potentially for two or more students, will further examine the role that an individual’s personality plays in the way in which we sense the world and then respond to it. We aim to use the behavioural paradigms we have established to examine exactly what aspects of an individual’s personality contribute to the construction of the resultant meaningful percept.
  
  Antinori, A., Carter, O., & Smillie, L. D. (2017). Seeing it both ways: Openness to experience and binocular rivalry suppression. Journal of Research in Personality, 68, 15-22. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2017.03.005

  Antinori, A., Smillie, L. D., & Carter, O. L. (2016). Personality Measures Link Slower Binocular Rivalry Switch Rates to Higher Levels of Self-Discipline. Front Psychol, 7, 2008. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02008

  Partos, T. R., Cropper, S. J., & Rawlings, D. (2016). You Don't See What I See: Individual Differences in the Perception of Meaning from Visual Stimuli. PLoS One, 11(3), e0150615. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0150615

  
  

  Fear and Consumption

  Project Number: 195 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  There is an ongoing fascination with how people make decisions about their consumer behaviour and the subsequent impact of this upon others. In an environment where there needs of the planet contrast starkly with the needs of the market, understanding what encourages people to behave in a more empathetic, altruistic and social way when they make their consumer decisions is critical to changing that behaviour for the global good. These projects (2-3) are based around the ideas of Abundance (a sense of personal sufficiency) and Vitality Salience (a sense of life) and how each of these factors affect consumer and social behaviour. The projects are a collaboration between Gergely Niyalsy and I and will be conducted both here and in the Department of Marketing.
  
  

  Perceived speed and flicker in chromatic stimuli

  Project Number: 196 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  Purely chromatic stimuli appear to move more slowly than their luminance-defined counterparts. While this is not necessarily evidence for compromised chromatic motion processing, it is a very powerful and interesting phenomena. I have worked on chromatic motion perception for a long time and it occurs to me that there is some relationship between perceived speed and general time perception. This project will examine ways in which a chromatic stimulus may be speeded up, possibly by placing on a flickering background, in order to disentangle the relationship between time perception and speed perception in anomalous stimuli.

• Dr Simon De Deyne

  Cross-cultural evaluation of distributional models of word meaning

  Project Number: 201 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: Programming experience is not required but would be advantageous. Some knowledge of Chinese, Japanese or Indonesian would also be a useful.
  
  

  Background. Most theories of word meaning in psychology focus on concrete concepts like “rose” or “dog”, their core features (rose – has thorns) and taxonomic relations (dog – mammal), instead of thematic relations (dog – bone).  The fact that words have strong affective connotations (e.g. roses – romantic, communists – evil), is often ignore, partly because connotations are culture-specific and research in psychology has overwhelmingly relied on Western participants. Therefore, it is unclear if we can account for word meaning for people with different cultural backgrounds speaking different languages. This is surprising because several studies have found systematic cultural differences between Western and Eastern cultures in a variety of areas such as taxonomic vs thematic relations in concrete concepts, or affective loading for abstract concepts. Still, the experimental findings for cultural differences are not always convincing and often restricted to a single specific domain like trees or emotion terms (see Estes, Golonka & Jones, 2010).

  Study. This study will investigate how Western and Asian culture-specific aspects of meaning can be derived from language across a wide range of domains. This will include concrete concepts (e.g., colours, animals), abstract concepts and concepts with affective connotatio. For each of these concepts, we will investigate how distributional models of semantic can explain human subjective judgments of meaning, for example through similarity judgments between the concepts, and quantify how this performance depends on different semantic relations (e.g. taxonomic, thematic). We will make use recent multilingual aligned distributional semantic models of meaning (e.g. Mandera, Keuleers & Brysbaert, 2017) to predict human judgments of similarity. This will allow us to address three main questions (1) to what extend does language determine the culture-specific meaning of concepts, (2) to what degree are the differences domain-specific and (3) can different semantic relations (e.g. taxonomic vs thematic) or affective loading explain cultural differences.

  Student Profile. You are interested in experimental and computational approaches to study language and memory. During this honours project, you will get the opportunity to learn about natural language processing techniques and be involved in all aspects of doing research (ethics, pre-registration, data-analysis, and reporting). You will use established distributional semantic models and be involved in the communication with international collaborators who will also support data-collection of non-English speakers.

  Research Environment. Your honours project will be supervised by Dr Simon De Deyne at the Complex Human Data Hub (CHDH) of the MSPS and Dr Meredith McKague, expert on bilingualism.

  References

  Mandera, P., Keuleers, E., & Brysbaert, M. (2017). Explaining human performance in psycholinguistic tasks with models of semantic similarity based on prediction and counting: A review and empirical validation. Journal of Memory and Language, 92, 57-78.

  Bojanowski, P. Grave, E. Joulin, A., & Mikolov, T (2017). Enriching word vectors with subword information. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 5,135–146.

  Estes, Z., Golonka, S., & Jones, L. L. (2011). Thematic thinking: The apprehension and consequences of thematic relations. In Psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 54, pp. 249-294). Academic Press."

  
  

  How do word sentiment differences affect second language learning?

  Project Number: 202 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: Programming experience is not required but would be advantageous. Some knowledge of Chinese, Japanese or Indonesian would also be a useful.
  
  

  Most words in language have affective connotations. Factor analytic studies have shown a word’s connotation is captured by three largely independent, dimensions: valence (positiveness–negativeness), arousal (active–passive), and dominance (dominant–submissive) (Osgood, Succi & Tannenbaum, 1957). The role of sentiment or affect in word processing has been widely documented, showing advantages of emotional stimuli relative to neutral stimuli (Kousta et al., 2011).  Affect is also communicated at the lexical level and recent studies has shown that the affect can be accurately predicted from how words are used in language (Lenci, Lebani, & Passaro, 2018). These predictions are derived from distributional semantic models, in which the meaning of a word is derived from the context in which it occurs. This prediction is accurate because words that co-occur together in language often carry the same affective connotation: they tend to be similarly positive or exciting.

  Many words also have culture-specific affective connotations and systematic differences between Western and Asian cultures are well documented (Kuppens et al., 2017; Lin, 2016). For example, the word “fat” in Chinese does not carry the same negative connotation when describing a person as it does in English. Such affective interference occurs when the sentiment expressed of a word in your own language does not match the sentiment of a word you learn in a second language.

  In this honours project we will quantify cultural differences in affective connotation derived from either distributional semantic models or subjective ratings to test connotative interference in L2 speakers. We will adapt existing methods to study how bilinguals with different levels of proficiency handle conflicting affective connotations between their first (L1) and second language (L2). The participants will be students who are native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, or Indonesian and speak English as their second language. We will focus on affective connotation in a broad sense and include both emotion and emotion-laden words in a series of computer-based experiments. There are several tasks that have been proposed in the literature such as the implicit association tasks (Greenwald, McGhee), affective Simon tasks (Altarriba & Basnight-Brown, 2011), affective ratings in L2 vs L1, etc. The main criterion is that the task will vary the presence of affective connotation to pinpoint whether affective or other factors determine the observed differences in both languages.

  Student Profile. You are interested in experimental and computational approaches to study language. Programming experience is not required but would be advantageous. Some knowledge of Chinese, Japanese or Indonesian would also be a useful. During this honours project, you will get the opportunity to learn about natural language processing techniques and be involved in all aspects of doing research (ethics, pre-registration, participant recruitment, data-analysis, and reporting). You will use established distributional semantic models and be involved in the communication with international collaborators who will provide additional support for data-collection in non-English speakers.

  Research Environment. Your honours project will be supervised by Dr Simon De Deyne at the Complex Human Data Hub (CHDH) of the MSPS and Dr Meredith McKague, expert on bilingualism.

  References

  Altarriba, J., & Basnight-Brown, D.M. (2011). The representation of emotion versus emotion-laden words in English and Spanish in the Affective Simon Task. International Journal of Bilingualism, 15, 310-328,

  Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: the implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480.

  Kousta, S. T., Vigliocco, G., Vinson, D. P., Andrews, M., & Del Campo, E. (2011). The representation of abstract words: why emotion matters. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140, 14-34.

  Kuppens, P., Tuerlinckx, F., Yik, M., Koval, P., Coosemans, J., Zeng, K. J., & Russell, J. A. (2017). The relation between valence and arousal in subjective experience varies with personality and culture. Journal of Personality, 85, 530-542.

  Lenci, A., Lebani, G. E., & Passaro, L. C. (2018). The Emotions of Abstract Words: A Distributional Semantic Analysis. Topics in Cognitive Science. 1-23.

  Lim, N. (2016). Cultural differences in emotion: differences in emotional arousal level between the East and the West. Integrative Medicine Research, 5, 105-109.

  Osgood, C. E., Suci, G., & Tannenbaum, P.H. (1957). The measurement of meaning. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 335.

• Professor Simon Dennis

  The impact of emotion on episodic memory

  Project Number: 211 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  Memories that are associated with events that evoke strong emotions are called flashbulb memories and are sometimes thought to be retained in a more veridical form than other memories, although this proposal has been challenged extensively (Brown & Kulik, 1977; McCloskey, Wible & Cohen, 1988). Studies of memory and emotion have typically relied on retrospective reports of the emotions that participants felt at the time of the event or have assumed that certain public events are likely to have evoked the similar emotions across the populus. In this study, we will have participants record the emotions associated with everyday events at the time of the event using their phones, and will subsequently test their memories for the details of the events to determine the extent to which emotion affects memory encoding.

  
  

  Understanding memory for WHERE

  Project Number: 212 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Ronald Cotton was convicted for a rape he did not commit and spent 11 years in jail before being released in 1995 on the basis of DNA evidence. There were many factors that contributed to the conviction, but an important one was a faulty alibi that he provided because he incorrectly recalled where he had been at the time of the rape. In this study, we will study people’s ability to recall where they were using experience sampling technologies. Participants will install an app on their phones that will record where they are over a month period. Subsequently, we will ask them questions about their locations and determine what factors influence the errors they make.
  
  

  Receptive and Productive Word Frequencies and Episodic Memory

  Project Number: 213 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  The normative frequency of a word influences episodic memory in conflicting ways. If participants are presented with a list of words to study and are then required to determine if a subsequent set of test words were studied (recognition memory) they perform better on low frequency words. If, however, they are asked to recall the list of study words they do better on high frequency words (usually). Normative word frequency is used as a proxy for the experience of the individual, but in fact people vary a lot in both the words to which they are exposed and the words that they produce. In this study, we will calculate frequency statistics from individual’s emails to create person specific measures of the frequency and recency of the words people have seen and used. They will then be asked to do both recognition and recall tests to determine how frequency impacts different kinds of episodic memory.
• Dr Paul Dudgeon

  Confidence intervals for standardized mean difference between groups

  Project Number: 221 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: Suitable for student who enjoys research methods and wishes to learn more about quantitative methods in psychological research. It will involve learning how to write computer code in MATLAB to undertake the simulation. This project can be started early because no ethics clearance will be required.
  
  

  Standardized mean differences such as Cohen's d, Hedges g, or Bonett's delta are often reported as an effect size measure in psychological research. Confidence intervals on such measures rely on assumptions of both normality and homogeneity of variance (Cohen's d and Hedges' g) or on normality (Bonett's delta). This project will investigate a proposed interval estimator for standardized mean differences that theoretically does not rely on either assumption. Its robustness to violation of these assumptions will be assessed using a Monte Carlo simulation (which involves generating data in a computer using an experimental design to investigate robustness).

  
  

  Model misfit in structural equation modelling

  Project Number: 222 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: It might be useful to read the article by McDonald and Ho cited above to get an idea of what this project might involve (it can be accessed through PsycINFO). It is not important, not expected, that you understand the details of this article...the main reason for reading it is to get a broader idea of what the project might involve. The research methods subject in first semester will teach students about structural equation modelling. This project can be started early because no ethics clearance will be required.
  
  
  The fit of structural equation models to data is often assessed using a chi-squared goodness-of-fit test. It has been shown previously that some reported models in the literature have acceptable fit according to this test, but the structural part of the model may still be poorly fitting (McDonald & Ho, 2002, Psychological Methods, Vol 7, 64-82). This study will be a systematic review of the prevalence of poor-fitting structural parts of models that have been reported in the literature over the last 20 years. It will involve locating appropriate journal articles using the PsycINFO database, extracting relevant information from these articles, and synthesising that information to provide a better understanding of how structural equation models reported in the literature may be giving misleading indications of how well they fit.
  
  

  An evaluation of evidence for replication in psychological research

  Project Number: 223 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: This project will suit students who wish to learn more about how psychological research is undertaken and how to critically evaluate it. Students will learn how to systematically review studies, plus collect, code, and analyse secondary data. This project can be started early because no ethics clearance will be required.
  
  
  The so-called "replication crisis" in psychological research has been repeatedly examined over the last 6 years, with differing views being aired about the crisis and its "causes". This thesis project will involve (i) a critical review of the methods used in replication studies (there have been at least 5 large scale replication projects undertaken, for which data and methods are publicly available), and (ii) a comparison of ways that replication might be assessed. The project will involve accessing and downloading the publicly-available data for individual studies in replication projects and critically reviewing methods and outcomes against defined criteria that will be developed in the thesis project.
• Dr Natalia Egorova

  Sensory language learning

  Project Number: 231 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  We learn new words from early childhood through to old age. We try a piece of fruit and are told it is “Durian”; we accidentally step into something hot on the ground and hear “Hangi!”; everyone in a restaurant in Switzerland says “En Guete” and we imitate and say it too when our cheese fondue is served. Word learning in adults takes place naturally through exposure (personal experience, observing others). The learning of the word (form) is merged with the learning of the concept, sensation, behaviour that it refers to (referent) and its intended function, for example, to warn (“Hangi!”) or explain why the fruit smells bad (“Durian!”). Yet most of our knowledge about word learning in adults comes from ‘sterile’ experimental paradigms: learning word forms without meaning, mapping words to definitions or images of non-existent objects with no particular communicative intention.

  The lack of progress in understanding the mechanisms of natural contextualised word learning is linked to the limitations of the methods and paradigms used to investigate language learning. Previous research focused on studying phenomena that can be easily adapted to experimental paradigms, such as investigating the learning of concrete nouns (like chair) and avoided the complexities of studying abstract words denoting feelings and concepts (like happiness). To investigate abstract sensory words (warmth, pain), pseudo-words need to be combined with physical sensations. Experimental pain research is uniquely suited to delivering precisely controlled sensory stimuli that can be used to create meaningful sensory words.

  In a series of experiments at the interface of language and pain, you will take advantage of the state-of-the-art experimental pain methodology to comprehensively investigate mechanisms of sensory word learning in adults, incorporating vital elements of naturalistic word learning such as diversity of learning types (associative, observational, experiential) (Project 1a) and embedding in communicative functions (Project 1b).

• Professor Kim Felmingham

  Hair Cortisol and Risk of Developing Psychopathology after Injury

  Project Number: 241 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  Kim Felmingham, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne Meaghan O’Donnell, Phoenix Australia, Dept of Psychiatry, University of Melbourne

  While most Australian’s will experience a traumatic event in their lifetime, only a significant minority will develop posttraumatic stress disorder (10-20%) and a similar sized group will develop major depressive disorder. A key area of research is how to identify who will develop Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and/or depression. Recent research suggests that PTSD and depression are related to changes in biological homeostasis, specifically the release of certain stress hormones (such as cortisol). One of the difficulties with current techniques of examining the role of these stress hormones in the development of disorder is the limitation in capturing premorbid and chronic levels of stress hormones. The examination of cortisol dysregulation is key to understanding the risk for development of PTSD and depression.

  Hair cortisol concentrations (HCC) allow for the assessment of retrospective cortisol levels over periods of several months. It is easily obtainable and permits the investigation of cortisol activity prior to a traumatic event based on samples taken post-trauma. Hair analysis using liquid chromatography mass spectrometry is a relative new technique to evaluate hair steroid levels over a period of time.

  The aim of this research is to examine whether pre trauma cortisol levels indicates risk for the development of PTSD or depression.

  This project for an honours student sits in a larger program of research. The student will recruit trauma survivors from the injury wards at Royal Melbourne Hospital. They will collect hair samples according to a standardised protocol, and will also trained in the administration of a clinical interview. They will be working with other research assistants on the project.

  This research project is an excellent project for honour’s students interested in a clinical outcomes and working with clinical populations. Excellent interpersonal and time management skills are important in this project.

  Questions: please contact Sonia Terhaag on 03 8344 1204 or Sonia.terhaag@unimelb.edu.au

  Note: The majority of data has been collected for this project, but additional data collection will occur to add to an existing (relatively large) sample.

  
  

  The Effect of Catastrophic Thinking Following Trauma on Fear Extinction Recall

  Project Number: 242 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Supervisor: Professor Kim Felmingham, MSPS
  
  There is increasing evidence that individuals with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder display impaired capacity in fear extinction recall, which may lead to heightened ongoing arousal and relapse from exposure treatments. However, the mechanisms that influence this impaired fear extinction recall are unclear.
  
  There is some evidence of a hormonal influence on fear extinction recall, but it has recently been recognized that fear comprises physiological and higher-order cognitive components (LeDoux & Pine, 2016). There is very little research examining cognitive influences on fear extinction recall. This project will examine whether catastrophic thinking following trauma affects fear extinction recall in participants with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, or who have experienced trauma-exposure.
  
  This project will be an experimental lab-based study where the honours student will complete data collection using a fear conditioning and extinction task, in collaboration with a PhD student and a research assistant. Data collected by the honours student will be added to an existing dataset (>40 participants), thereby ensuring the capacity to collect a sufficient sample size.
  
  This project will be run from the Trauma, Anxiety and Stress lab which has about 15 members. It will be funded by a current NHMRC grant.
  Contact: K.felmingham@unimelb.edu.au
  
  

  Exploring sex differences in bipolar disorder

  Project Number: 243 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Supervisors:
  Kim Felmingham, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne
  Andrea Gogos, Hormones in Psychiatry Laboratory, Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, University of Melbourne
  Tamsyn Van Rheenen, Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre, University of Melbourne
  Contact: andrea.gogos@florey.edu.au ; 9035 6798
  
  Project Description:
  Bipolar disorder is a complex disorder characterised by extreme fluctuations in mood, from manic highs to depressive lows. Surprisingly little is known about sex differences in symptom profile and cognitive function in bipolar disorder. There are some reports of sex differences in incidence and symptoms, however these are inconsistent. Further, sex-specific effects on cognitive profiles have been largely unexplored in the bipolar disorder literature. The present project will use a large, existing data set of >70 participants that have had various neuropsychological tests measured and an extensive symptom profile assessed. The aim of this project is to examine sex differences in symptom profile and cognitive function in bipolar disorder.
  
  Note: The majority of the data have already been collected for this project and thus, a large component will involve hypothesis-driven statistical analysis. Student authorship is guaranteed on any publications resulting from this project.
• Dr Jason Forte

  Does the placebo effect and experience of electrical stimulation influence the outcome of tDCS?

  Project Number: 251 Places available for this project: 3
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has become one of the most widely used noninvasive techniques to try and influence behaviour in the laboratory and clinic. However, it remains a hotbed of contention on just how tDCS influences brain activity. One important unanswered question is whether the placebo effect and subjective experience of electical stimulation of the skin can account for some of the effects of tDCS. The ethical use of tDCS in a clinical setting depends on understanding the direct effects of tDCS on brain function. The first step is to manipulate the strength of tDCS and see how much people’s expectations and subjective experience is correlated with performance on tasks that have been reported to be modulated by tDCS. These studies will test REP participants in the Redmond Barry building using ethics protocols that have already been approved. We hope that the knowledge gained from these studies can be used to develop improved tDCS protocols for psychological intervention.

  
  

  Is arithmetic competency related to eye movements during dot counting?

  Project Number: 252 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Researchers have suggested that poor arithmetic is associated with the type of strategies that people use to count dots on a screen. This finding is consistent with the idea that basic numerical processing strategies limit the acquisition of symbolic number ability at school. What is not well understood is whether there is a direct relationship between how groups of dots are processed on a given trial and the time it takes to answer how many dots are there. If we find a direct relationship between how dots and number symbols are combined then we may be able to develop a better account of the factors that lead to low numeracy. The long term aim is to develop interventions that target core number processes prior to the development of symbolic number. Ethics protocols have been approved for these studies to test REP participants in the Redmond Barry building.
  
  

  The cost of irreproducible psychological research

  Project Number: 253 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  * note in conjunction with Pat Goodbourn
  
  Reproducibility is a hallmark of science, and central to its progress. The Reproducibility Project: Psychology (Open Science Collaboration, 2015) attempted replications of 100 studies published in three prominent psychology journals. Worryingly, more than 50% of replication studies failed to reproduce the results of the original. What is the cost of irreproducible research in psychology? This project will use existing data from the Reproducibility Project in online and lab-based experimental studies. The aim will be to understand how people make personal, financial and policy decisions based on psychological research, and how their decision making is influenced by reproducibility. By identifying the extent to which concerns of reproducibility shape decision-making processes, the project will provide a clearer picture of the wider costs of irreproducible psychological research.
  
  Open Science Collaboration (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), aac4716. doi: 10.1126/science.aac4716.
• Dr Patrick Goodbourn

  Altered perception and cognitive function in schizotypy and schizophrenia

  Project Number: 261 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  Supervisors: Dr Patrick Goodbourn & A/Prof. Olivia Carter Many people with schizophrenia experience hallucinations or unusual sensory experiences. These perceptual changes may cause distress, confusion or anxiety. Previous studies have shown that people with schizophrenia have altered performance on a range of perceptual and cognitive tasks. However, we do not yet know the extent to which these deficits are limited to schizophrenia, or exist in other psychiatric conditions or healthy individuals. This project will use a range of tasks on which performance is impaired in schizophrenia. The aim will be to determine whether deficits are also associated with certain profiles of schizotypy—normal personality traits and experiences that resemble symptoms of schizophrenia. The project will identify perceptual hallmarks of high schizotypy in a non-clinical population, and refine our understanding of the relationship between schizophrenia-related symptom profiles and perceptual performance.

  
  

  The cost of irreproducible psychological research

  Project Number: 253 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Supervisors: Dr Patrick Goodbourn & Dr Jason Forte
  
  Reproducibility is a hallmark of science, and central to its progress. The Reproducibility Project: Psychology (Open Science Collaboration, 2015) attempted replications of 100 studies published in three prominent psychology journals. Worryingly, more than 50% of replication studies failed to reproduce the results of the original. What is the cost of irreproducible research in psychology? This project will use existing data from the Reproducibility Project in online and lab-based experimental studies. The aim will be to understand how people make personal, financial and policy decisions based on psychological research, and how their decision making is influenced by reproducibility. The project will identify the extent to which concerns of reproducibility shape decision-making processes, providing a clearer picture of the wider cost of irreproducible psychological research.
  
  Open Science Collaboration (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), aac4716. doi: 10.1126/science.aac4716.
• Dr Katie Greenaway

  New Frontiers in Emotion Regulation

  Project Number: 271 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  My expertise is in emotion regulation, and my students' Honours projects will focus on methods of assessing and improving emotion regulation skill. I am looking for students who are interested in learning new research skills and who work well within the context of regular meetings, short-term goal setting, and structured guidance.

• Dr Scott Griffiths

  EMAGRAM 2: An advanced smartphone-facilitated experience sampling study of thinspiration and fitspiration

  Project Number: 281 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  Thinspiration and fitspiration are internationally popular classes of social media content that idealise thin and fit/muscular bodies, respectively. Body image experts are interested in whether, and to what extent, these ostensibly 'inspiring' forms of social media actually contribute to negative body image and affective functioning among men and women alike. Our team conducted an experience sampling study of thinspiration and fitspiration exposure and demonstrated inter- and intra-gender differences in thinspiration and fitspiration exposure. Moreover, we demonstrated substantial adverse impacts of exposure on body image and affective functioning. However, a limitation of this study was that we had no way of knowing what, exactly, participants were seeing when they reported exposure to thinspiration and fitspiration.

  In EMAGRAM 2, you will co-design, conduct conduct an advanced smartphone-facilitated experience sampling study that involves passive collection of mobile phone screen data. Essentially, this will allow us to ‘see what participants’ see when they report exposure to thinspiration and fitspiration. By doing so, you will be responsible for a major development in our understanding of the impact of body-idealising social media content on health and well-being. You will be given a workspace in our lab on Level 7 of the Redmond Barry Building. The lab is a collegial space that is home to other Honours, Masters and PhD students, and collectively we form the Physical Appearance Research Team. For this project, you will receive considerable statistical help from Scott.

  To get a feel for our research, you can follow Scott on twitter (@Scott1Griffiths). Please ask questions at your leisure. If you want to talk to a team member who has conducted similar research, you may contact Ashleigh (astefanovski@student.unimelb.edu.au).

  
  

  Gendered body perceptions: An experimental test of the masculinity and femininity hypotheses

  Project Number: 282 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Anorexia nervosa and muscle dysmorphia are eating disorders centred on perceptions of inadequate thinness and muscularity, respectively. Studies of gender differences in these disorders indicate that they are gender-linked. In brief, the majority of individuals with anorexia nervosa are women and the majority of individuals with muscle dysmorphia are men.
  
  The masculinity and femininity hypotheses have been proposed as socio-cultural explanations for gender differences in anorexia nervosa and muscle dysmorphia. Specifically, these hypotheses propose that individuals’ conformity to traditional masculine and feminine norms places them at relatively higher risk of developing muscularity- and thinness-oriented body dissatisfaction and eating disorders, respectively, because individuals may wish for others to view them in close concordance with the gender to which they adhere. In support of these hypotheses, our research suggests that individuals with anorexia nervosa and muscle dysmorphia do indeed report relatively greater conformity to feminine and masculine norms, respectively. However, a hitherto untested assumption of these hypotheses is that laypeople actually perceive muscular and thin bodies as masculine and feminine, respectively. If these assumptions do not hold, then the masculinity and femininity hypotheses become less tenable explanations for why there are gender differences in anorexia nervosa and muscle dysmorphia.
  
  You will co-design, conduct, analyse and write-up a quasi-experimental study design that examines undergraduates’ perceptions of various male and female bodies as masculine and feminine. You will be given a workspace in our lab on Level 7 of the Redmond Barry Building. The lab is a collegial space that is home to other Honours, Masters and PhD students, and collectively we form the Physical Appearance Research Team.  
  
  To get a feel for our research, you can follow Scott on twitter (@Scott1Griffiths). Please ask questions at your leisure. If you want to talk to a team member who has conducted similar research, you may contact Emma ( eausten@student.unimelb.edu.au ).
• Dr Christopher Groot

  Developing a symptom-focussed model of public stigma about schizophrenia.

  Project Number: 291 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  One project offered in The Stigma Lab. Supervision provided by Dr Christopher Groot. Schizophrenia is arguably the most stigmatised of all psychiatric disorders. In 2017, our stigma lab investigated how categories of psychotic illness factors, such as positive and negative symptoms, influenced people’s stigmatic thoughts, attitudes, and behaviours about someone with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Our recent findings suggest that general positive symptoms elicit greater levels of stigma broadly when compared to general negative symptoms, but also, that general positive and negative symptoms each elicit unique aspects of stigma. This 2019 Honours project will further develop this work by systematically investigating stigmatic responses to specific aspects of psychosis, with a focus on signs of positive and negative thought disorder.

  
  

  Stigma in Telephone and Online Counsellors towards Clients with Borderline Personality Disorder and other Challenging Presentations.

  Project Number: 292 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  One project offered in The Stigma Lab. Primary supervision provided by Dr Christopher Groot. Co-supervision provided by Dr Anna Brooks (Lifeline) and Dr Michelle Blanchard (SANE Australia).
  
  Stigma towards clients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) has been observed in a range of face-to-face mental health professionals and manifests in terms of negative stereotypes, attitudes, emotional responses, and behaviour. For example, clients with BPD are often described by mental health workers as difficult, manipulative, demanding, and attention seeking. Stigma towards challenging BPD presentations is theorised to detract from clinical assessment of symptoms, impair the therapeutic alliance, and have deleterious effects on treatment outcomes.
  
  While a considerable body of literature has investigated stigma towards BPD presentations and its impact on clinical practice and client outcomes in a face-to-face service setting, no known study to date has explored these phenomena in a telephone and online (collectively, ‘teleweb’) mental health service setting. Yet, people with BPD are frequent clients of teleweb mental health services in Australia. Given that the service context is comparable to face-to-face emergency departments insomuch as a readily accessible support is available during crisis, teleweb counsellors often encounter particularly challenging presentations with BPD clients. The project proposed here is to be the first of its kind in the teleweb mental health sector, and will comprise an initial an important step in a larger program of research aiming to build the capacity of teleweb services to provide good clinical outcomes for clients living with BPD. This specific project will assess how different types of counsellors (volunteer, professional, and those with lived experience of mental illness) respond to clients with BPD and other challenging presentations.
• Professor Nick Haslam

  Concept creep

  Project Number: 301 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  I will be supervising two projects on 'concept creep': the tendency for some psychological concepts to broaden their meanings over time. My past work has shown that harm-related concepts (e.g., abuse, bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, trauma) are used to refer to a much broader range of phenomena now than in previous decades. This semantic inflation has occurred both within the psychology literature and among the general public. For example, whereas 'trauma' once referred only to severe, life-threatening events, the word is now often used to refer to relatively minor adversities as well: its meaning has become more inclusive.

  I am open to developing projects with interested students that document concept creep in relation to particular concepts, that examine factors that might influence it (societally, culturally or at the level of individual differences), or that investigate its consequences. Studies might collect new data or conduct sophisticated analyses of existing 'big data'.

  In 2017, fourth year students worked with me on studies of: 1) cultural differences in the inclusiveness of the concept of 'mental disorder' and how these contributed to cultural differences in mental health help-seeking; 2) individual differences in the inclusiveness of concepts of sexual harassment and gender discrimination, and how these differences influenced judgements of perpetrators and victims of sexism; and 3) changes across successive editions of the DSM in the inclusiveness of criteria for diagnosing mental disorders.

• Professor Rob Hester

  Using smartphone assessment of cognitive function to intervene in adolescent binge-drinking

  Project Number: 311 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  Participating Organisations: Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, eResearch (Department of Computing and Information Systems)

  Supervisors: Professor Rob Hester and Ms Antoinette Poulton, MSPS

  Brief Description of the Project: This project aims to examine the use of smartphone technology for collecting information about alcohol consumption and cognition. Further, by conducting brief and repeated assessment of both alcohol use and cognitive function, the project will assess if real-time feedback to individuals about alcohol-related declines in cognitive function reduces alcohol use and alcohol-related harms.

  Adolescent binge drinking is a significant public health problem in Australia, increasing the risk of exposure to significant injury, health problems and crime. The problem is both a widespread and difficult problem in which to intervene. One key feature of this difficulty is the delay between the onset of binge drinking and many of the subsequent harms that an individual experiences (e.g., accidents, health problems, relationship breakdown, crime). Cognition, as a marker of brain health, is relatively unique in that it has the capacity to reflect the immediate negative consequences of alcohol consumption. While such harms have long been known, the advent of recent smartphone technology has for the first time made it possible, at a population level, to provide individuals with that information in real-time. The availability and penetration of this technology will also make it possible to involve a broad spectrum of the Australian community in the research, including those adolescents who might otherwise not due to issues of equity and confidentiality. Smartphones have proven effective method for delivering a range of public health interventions and adolescents have been keep adopters of, and accustomed to, tracking their own activity and health using smartphone technology. We have developed and collected preliminary data from adolescents using a smartphone-based application for repeated assessment of alcohol use, cognition and associated harms (e.g., injury, crime). The proposed study will assess participants longitudinally over a 2 month period to identify the relationship between changes in alcohol consumption, cognitive function and risk for developing dependence.

  
  

  The Healthy Brain Project: understanding the contributions of midlife risk factors to cognitive decline and the development of Alzheimer’s disease in late-life

  Project Number: 312 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Lab Name: Cognitive Ageing Laboratory at the Melbourne Dementia Research Centre, Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health and the University of Melbourne
  Project Supervisors: Dr Yen Ying Lim, Dr Matthew Pase, Professor Rob Hester
  Contact: yen.lim@florey.edu.au
  
  Background: The pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease begins many years prior to diagnosis. Multiple large prospective studies now show that the accumulation of amyloid and tau begins many decades before clinical symptoms. To understand the genesis of Alzheimer’s disease, we aim to study a large group of middle-aged Australians (n=10,000; aged 40-70 years) with a first- or second-degree family history of dementia to determine the contribution of non-modifiable (genes, sex) and modifiable midlife factors (e.g., mood, vascular risk, sleep, diet, social engagement, cognitive activity) to cognitive decline and future risk of Alzheimer’s disease. To remain as open and as flexible to participants as possible, all testing for the main study is conducted online on our secure website, healthybrainproject.org.au.
  
  This initiative is led by a group of emerging leaders in cognition, neurology, biostatistics, epidemiology, neuroimaging, and molecular biology, and we are mentored by eminent experts in neuropsychology, neurology and Alzheimer’s disease (Prof Ashley Bush, A/Prof Amy Brodtmann, Prof Paul Maruff, Prof Colin Masters, Prof Reisa Sperling, Prof Patricia Desmond, Prof Sudha Seshadri).
  Potential Projects:
  1. To determine the feasibility, reliability and usability of an online platform for the recruitment and the assessment of cognitive function, mood, sleep and physical activity in middle-aged adults with a family history of dementia, and to determine factors that affect participant engagement in order to optimize retention rates;
  2. To determine the effect of genes, or combination of genes, on cognitive decline and risk of AD in middle-aged adults;
  3. To investigate the effect of modifiable risk factors (e.g., sleep, diet, physical activity, social engagement, cognitive reserve, mood) on cognitive function;
  4. To investigate the effect of midlife cardiovascular risk factors on cognitive function, both cross-sectionally and prospectively.
  Methods:
  Participants are required to provide consent and enrol online on our website. Participants are then directed to complete a series of cognitive tests and questionnaires pertaining to their current and past medical history, mood (including personality and subjective ratings of their memory abilities), and lifestyle (including sleep, physical activity, diet, social engagement). Once these online tests and questionnaires are complete, participants are mailed a saliva sampling kit. Participants are invited to return every year to complete the online tests and questionnaires. By investigating the contributions of both modifiable and non-modifiable risk factors, we will determine the point at which cognitive function begins to deteriorate in individuals at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
  Progress: Approximately 5000 participants have been recruited so far for the main Healthy Brain Project, and data from our first DataFreeze is available for analysis. Student authorship is guaranteed on any publications arising from their Honours project, with authorship ranking negotiable and based on relative contribution of authors.
  
  

  Understanding physical health problems and predictors of poor health outcomes 15 years after a first episode psychosis

  Project Number: 313 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Orygen Unit: Health Services and Outcomes Research
  Supervisors: Prof Sue Cotton, Dr Amity Watson, Dr Aswin Ratheesh, Prof Rob Hester
  Contact: sue.cotton@orygen.org.au and mobile 0407-340-115
  
  Project Description: Individuals with psychotic disorders are at greater risk of early mortality as compared to the general population. Various reasons have been posed to explain the early mortality including lifestyle (e.g., poor diet, substance use, absence of exercise) and treatment factors (e.g., side-effects from antipsychotic medications). There is some evidence that these risk factors are present early in the illness course of psychosis, including at the incipient episode. This study will involve examination of a unique cohort of individuals that were treated for a first episode psychosis 15 years ago at the Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Service. Participants are currently being recruited to this study with over 100 being interviewed. The physical health outcomes of this cohort will be examined relative to health controls and normative population data. The honours student is expected to help with the recruitment of healthy control group.

  Cognitive functioning and physical health in first-episode psychosis and healthy controls

  Project Number: 314 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  "Orygen Unit: Cognition/STAGES

  Supervisors:Prof Rob Hester (internal),Dr Kelly Allott, Dr Brian O’Donoghue, Dr Shona Francey (external)

  Contact Details: kelly.allott@orygen.org.au; 9966 9423

  Project Description: Neuropsychological impairments are a common and early feature of psychotic disorders, with approximately 75% of young people with psychosis experiencing clinically significant neuropsychological deficits. Additionally, poor physical health outcomes are common for individuals with psychotic disorders who can have a reduced life expectancy by up to 20 years. One of the main contributors to this early mortality is cardiovascular disease caused by the metabolic side effects of antipsychotic medication, as well as other risk factors such as smoking and inactivity. There is evidence to suggest there is a relationship between physical health and cognitive functioning, but this has received limited investigation in the context of psychotic disorders.This project is a sub-study of a NHMRC-funded randomised controlled trial examining the risk-benefit ratio of antipsychotic use in first-episode psychosis. Physical health and cognition data have already being collected on people with first-episode psychosis and demographically matched healthy controls. It is expected that this thesis will be suitable for and submitted for publication following the honours year.

  *Ethics approval has been obtained for this study, only an amendment will be required "

• Dr Hinze Hogendoorn

  Decoding how the brain predicts the future position of moving objects

  Project Number: 321 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  The brain needs time to process sensory input, meaning that our conscious experience of the world is based on information that is outdated by the time we perceive it. This is a problem when we are trying to interact with moving objects, as we would see them behind where they are. One way that the brain might compensate for its internal delays is by prediction. This project uses advanced EEG analyses to study how the brain essentially “predicts” the present.

  
  

  What visual illusions can tell us about how the brain predicts the present

  Project Number: 322 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  The brain needs time to process sensory input, meaning that our conscious experience of the world is based on information that is outdated by the time we perceive it. This is a problem when we are trying to interact with moving objects, as we would see them behind where they are. We think that the brain might compensate for its internal delays by prediction. Of course, this is only possible when objects move along predictable trajectories. But what happens when predictions don’t come true? In this project, we study a recently discovered visual illusion (High-Phi – check out http://lpp.parisdescartes.cnrs.fr/wexler/highphi/index.html for demos) that we think reveals some of the ways the brain tricks us when its predictions don’t come true.
• Associate Professor Piers Howe

  Visual Amnesia

  Project Number: 331 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None. Programming skills are not required.
  
  

  In a fascinating study, Chen and Wyble (2015) showed that immediately after looking at a visual stimulus, observers were unable to report a highly salient aspect of the stimulus – a phenomenon now known as attribute amnesia. This phenomenon is interesting because it demonstrates a striking limitation of visual awareness. The proposed Honours project will build on both the Chen and Wyble study and on a more recent study by Chen and Howe (2018) to demonstrate that attribute amnesia occurs for perceptual attributes but not for conceptual attributes. In particular, we will hope to show that while people will often not be able to recognise an image that they have just seen, they will still be able to conceptually recall what they have just seen, thereby demonstrating the role of conceptual attributes in memory. Only by understanding this distinction between conceptual and perceptual attributes can theories of visual memory be refined. All experimental computer code and equipment will be provided. Programming skills are not required.

  
  

  The Visual Binding Problem

  Project Number: 332 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None. Programming skills are not required.
  
  
  When we look at, say, a mug, how are we able to see a coherent object instead of seeing just a jumble of disconnected features? Given that different features of a visual object are processed independently, often in separate parts of the brain, how is it that humans are able to bind together these different features to form a coherent percept of the object? Vul and Rich (2010) suggested that humans independently associate each feature with a particular region of space, thereby assuring that features that arise from the same location are perceived together. In this project, we will attempt to dispute this suggestion by showing that some features are directly bound to each other, independent of any location bindings. This project will therefore study what is perhaps the most fundamental issue in visual perception – the binding problem – and do so from a new angle. All experimental computer code and equipment will be provided. Programming skills are not required.
  
  

  Do Arbitrary Social Norms Influence Generosity?

  Project Number: 333 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None. Programming skills are not required.
  
  
  Social norms are one of the strongest influences on behaviour. Simply telling an individual what most other people do will often cause that individual to conform to the norm. Recent work (Pryor, Perfors & Howe, in press, Nature Human Behaviour) has shown that when making moral decisions people will follow social norms that they know to be completely arbitrary and not reflect what other people believe or did. However, in those experiments participants had no skin the game – the decisions they made did not affect themselves. In the current project we wish to determine if a similar result will hold when people’s decisions will directly affect themselves. In particular, we will study whether the degree to which people are willing to donate money to another person will be influenced by a norm that is known to be completely arbitrary. It is possible now that the decision will personally cost the participant, they will think about it more, so will not be influenced by clearly arbitrary norms. However, if our previous result continues to hold in this new context, this will show that the effect of arbitrary norms is not confined to moral decision-making but is also generalisable to a situation with direct real-world consequences. It is expected that this experiment will be conducted online via Qualtrics. Programming skills are not required.
  
  

  Visual Short-Term Memory (VSTM)

  Project Number: 334 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None. Programming skills are not required.
  
  
  Visual short-term memory is highly limited and this has a major influence on our visual awareness. It is generally accepted that it is easier to remember features that are bound together to form coherent objects than to remember a collection of disconnected features. This is known as the object advantage of VSTM. This phenomenon has become central to most theories of VSTM, so is quite important. This project will dispute this hypothesis and contrast it with a chunking hypothesis. It will attempt to show that although an object advantage holds for low complexity objects, it actually reverses when object complexity gets too high. Essentially, memory is easier when feature are group into “bite-sized” chunks but there is no true object advantage per se. If true, this would mean that most theories of VSTM would need to be reformulated. All experimental computer code and equipment will be provided. Programming skills are not required.
• Associate Professor Katherine Johnson

  The links between children’s attention and numeracy and literacy skills

  Project Number: 341 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: This research involves testing children in schools and involves travel. If you are interested in this project, please contact A/Prof Johnson to arrange an interview - kajo@unimelb.edu.au, before putting this down as a preference. Thank you.
  
  

  This project is part of a larger ARC-funded research program investigating the relations between cognitive attention control and the development of literacy and numeracy in children starting school. To be involved in this research, you must be eligible for a Working with Children Check.

  Lewis, F.C., Reeve, R., Johnson, K.A. A Longitudinal Analysis of the Attention Networks in 6- to 11-year-old Children. Child Neuropsychology, 2018, 24(2), 145-165. DOI: 10.1080/09297049.2016.1235145.

  Lewis, F.C., Reeve, R., Kelly, S.P., Johnson, K.A. Sustained attention to a predictable, unengaging Go/No-Go task shows ongoing development between 6 and 11 years. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2017, 79(6), 1726-1741. DOI: 10.3758/s13414-017-1351-4.

  
  

  The effects of nature (greenery) on attention control and mental well-being

  Project Number: 342 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Exposure to nature, such as green walls and green roofs, may help to maintain strong attention control and feelings of well-being, however the neural mechanisms underpinning how this works are not well understood. This project will investigate the effects of greenery on adult attention control and mental well-being using eye-tracking, pupillometry, questionnaires, and behavioural measures.
  
  Lee, K.E., Williams, K.J., Sargent, L.D., Williams, N.S., Johnson, K.A. 40-second green roof views sustain attention: The role of micro-breaks in attention restoration. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2015, 42(6), 182-189. DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2015.04.003
  
  Hartig, T., and Kahn, P.H. Living in cities, naturally. Science, 2016, May 20; 352(6288):938-940. doi: 10.1126/science.aaf3759.
• Associate Professor Amy Jordan

  Effect of alcohol on upper airway muscle function

  Project Number: 351 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: This project may involve some overnight data collection.
  
  

  Alcohol is known to induce or worsen snoring and obstructive sleep apnea, both of which have negative neurocognitive consequences. Alcohol is known to reduce the activity of the main airway dilator muscle. This project aims to investigate the precise effect on upper airway dilator muscle control in healthy human participants.

  
  

  Breath hold duration in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

  Project Number: 352 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: This project may involve some overnight data collection.
  
  
  Patients with Post-Traumatic Stress disorder have higher rates of the sleep condition obstructive sleep apnea than the general population. The reason for this is unknown, but may be related to how their brain controls breathing. This study will assess the brains control of breathing in a very simple manner – how long a participant can hold their breath for in individuals with a range of PTSD symptomatology.
  
  

  Predictors of motor vehicle accident risk in obstructive sleep apnea (Externally supervised study).

  Project Number: 353 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: This project may involve some overnight data collection.
  
  
  External supervisor: Dr Jennifer Cori, Austin Hospital.
  Obstructive sleep apnea is associated with a 3-fold increase for sleepiness related motor vehicle accidents. However, not all sleep apnea patients experience abnormal sleepiness and are at risk. Therefore, assessment of suitability to drive forms a critical component of clinical management of sleep apnea. Currently, there is no simple and accurate clinical tool available to assess suitability to drive in sleep apnea. The aim of this research proposal is to conduct a proof of concept study that assesses the ability of ocular alertness measures (changes in eye and eyelid movements that occur with sleepiness) to identify sleep apnea patients at risk of driving impairment.
  
  

  The effect of one night of induced Obstructive Sleep Apnea on airway muscle activity.

  Project Number: 354 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: This project may involve some overnight data collection.
  
  
  Obstructive sleep apnea is thought to be a self perpetuating condition, based on the observation that sleep deprivation worsens upper airway muscle function which is know to lead to sleep apnea. However, patients with sleep apnea don’t experience sleep deprivation from their condition, rather they experience sleep disturbance. Whether sleep apnea alters upper airway muscle function is unknown but will be assessed in this project.
• Professor Yoshi Kashima

  Cultural differences in the significance of respect in trust formation and decision making

  Project Number: 361 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  Research has shown that trust is the key factor in being able to reach mutually satisfactory outcomes in situations where parties’ interests appear misaligned and that respect is in important antecedent of trust. However, it is not clear whether and how respect is defined and perceived differently across cultures. In the current research, we examine the role of this important act in trust building across cultures. We argue that in cultures where people have strong reputational concerns (e.g. honour cultures or face cultures), being respected and socially acknowledged is essential in trusting the other party, while cultures with low reputational concerns (e.g. dignity cultures) do not as strongly adhere to the importance of respect. We are seeking 2 students to conduct two experiments assessing the moderating role of culture in the relationship between respect, trust formation and decision making. In Experiment 1, we will compare the effect of a respect manipulation on the behavioural tendencies of participants from different cultures in a mixed motive decision making task. In experiment 2, we will experimentally activate reputational concerns (independent of cultural background) and proceed to look at the effect of a relational manipulation on the behavioural tendencies of participants in a mixed motive decision making task.

  
  

  Acquiring norms: How do we learn our injunctive norms?

  Project Number: 362 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Social norms are significant influences on social behaviour. However, relatively little is known about the process by which people acquire social norms. Drawing on Cialdini’s well-known formulation, we define descriptive norms as patterns of behaviours that most people are engaged in (frequency-based) and injunctive norms as patterns of behaviours that people should engage in (morality-based) and we will experimentally investigate how people acquire norms.
  
  People may acquire a descriptive norm by observing others’ actions, but may evaluate that it is also morally correct (i.e., injunction) to behave in line with the descriptive norm, inferring that what is common is what is right. As suggested by Hume, it may be fallacious to go from is to ought; however, it appears to be an oft-observed psychological tendency (Kay et al., 2009; Tworek & Cimpian, 2016). Although these past studies have identified motivational and cognitive bases of this inferential process, little is known about socio-cultural mechanisms at play. We will extend the existing work by first getting people to learn a descriptive norm, and then manipulate social contextual factors to influence the motivational and cognitive mechanisms underlying the is-to-ought process, thereby examining a fundamental psychological process of norm acquisition.
  
  References
  
  Kay, A. C., Gaucher, D., Peach, J. M., Laurin, K., Friesen, J., Zanna, M. P., & Spencer, S. J. (2009). Inequality, discrimination, and the power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things are as the way they should be. Journal of personality and social psychology, 97(3), 421-434.
  
  Tworek, C. M., & Cimpian, A. (2016). Why do people tend to infer “ought” from “is”? The role of biases in explanation. Psychological science, 27(8), 1109-1122.
  
  

  Utopianism and its social psychological consequences

  Project Number: 363 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Recent studies in our lab have found that people have different visions of ideal society, which we call utopian visions. Some have visions of Green Utopia where ecologically friendly futures are achieved in the future, whereas others have Sci-Fi Utopian visions in which science and technology solves all human problems. We have shown that the activation of people’s utopian visions – especially Green Utopian visions – can strengthen their willingness to engage in behaviours designed to change their society for the better (citizenship for change). We extend this line of work.
  
  Fernando, J. W., Burden, N., Ferguson, A., O’Brien, L. V., Judge, M., & Kashima, Y. (2018). Functions of Utopia: How Utopian Thinking Motivates Societal Engagement. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(5), 779-792.
• Associate Professor Charles Kemp

  Reasoning in the presence of data selection

  Project Number: 371 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: Programming ability is desirable but not required.
  
  

  Suppose we want to know the average height of students on campus. If we compute the average height of members of the basketball team and give that as the estimate, it's obvious that the estimate will be too high. In cases like this people have no trouble understanding how the process of selecting data (we measured only basketball players) could distort the resulting estimate. In other cases, appreciating the consequences of data selection can be much harder. In World War II Abraham Wald was looking at bullet hole patterns in aircrafts that had returned from missions, and trying to figure out where additional armour should be added to the planes. His solution was to make note of the regions with lots of bullet holes and to add extra armour everywhere else. Wald's inference was far from obvious, but begins to make sense once you start to think about the planes that never returned to base, and where those planes might have been shot. We have developed a probabilistic model that makes predictions about how people adjust their inferences when the available data have been sampled nonrandomly. We plan to test it in a set of experiments where we present people with observations and see how their inferences vary as a function of their beliefs about how the observations were sampled. These experiments will be carried out as part of a collaboration with Brett Hayes and Danielle Navarro at UNSW.

  
  

  Language evolution: The role of environment and communication

  Project Number: 372 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: Programming ability is a plus (and will facilitate the ability to do interesting extensions) but is not required.
  
  
  Previous experimental and computation work in language evolution suggests that linguistic and conceptual systems tend to evolve so that they are on an “optimal frontier” that balances between simplicity (ease of learning) and expressiveness (the need probability for that concept). We plan on investigating this by having people learn simple novel concepts by being given examples (with labels) on a computer. After they learn, they are asked to label others. Their output is then given as input to the next participant. Over time, this creates a “chain” of evolution in which the actual concepts and labels change. We will manipulate different factors that might shape need probability in order to explore how those factors shape the system that emerges by the end of the chain. Two factors that we have identified are:
  
  #1. Need might be driven by the utility of the thing being expressed. For instance, it might be more important to have a word for “tiger” because it is important to know when a tiger is lurking nearby waiting to eat you, while it might be less important to have a word for a minor plant that nobody cares about. We will manipulate this by giving people different amount of points for getting specific items right, and exploring whether the final evolved system shapes itself around the high-point items.
  
  #2. Need might be driven by the communicative priority of the items. Other people might simply talk about tigers more often than lions, or you might be called upon to talk about them more, regardless of how dangerous either is.We will manipulate this by making people give labels for some items more than others, and exploring whether the final evolved system shapes itself around the high-frequency items.
  
  This project is envisioned as being run in conjunction with Amy Perfors and one other honours student. The student working with me will explore factor #2 while the one working with Amy will explore factor #1. Where appropriate, we will all four meet together in order to develop our ideas in tandem and ensure that the projects complement each other.
• Dr Litza Kiropoulos

  Depression- and Disability- Related Stigma, Internalised Shame, Help-Seeking Behaviours and Depressive and Anxiety Symptoms in Individuals with Multiple Sclerosis

  Project Number: 381 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  Individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) are at increased risk of experiencing anxiety and depressive symptoms (Garfield & Lincoln, 2012; Tan-Kristanto & Kiropoulos, 2015). Mental health outcomes vary widely amongst individuals with MS (Chalk, 2007). Exploring psychological factors, such as depression- and disability-related stigma, internalised shame and help-seeking behaviours in individuals with MS, will facilitate a greater understanding of the predictors of depressive and anxiety symptoms and barriers to treatment in this clinical population.

  Despite a concern about the mental and physical health of individuals with MS, the literature examining the predictors of mental health outcomes in this clinical population is limited. Importantly, research in this area has the potential to inform medical and mental health care and practice to improve the mental health outcomes of individuals with a diagnosis of MS.

  This study aims to investigate the relationships between depression- and disability-related stigma, internalised shame, help-seeking behaviours and depressive and anxiety symptoms in individuals with MS. In particular, the study aims to explore the strongest predictors of help-seeking behaviours and depressive and anxiety symptoms in individuals with MS.

  A cross-sectional design will be used. It is hoped that a sample of at least 100 individuals with MS will be recruited into the current study. Participants will complete an online questionnaire regarding demographics, disability, depressive, anxiety and stress symptoms, disability- and depression-related stigma, and internalised shame.

  We will be recruiting through advertisements on websites and noticeboards in places frequented by individuals with MS. Individuals will be invited to participate in the research by following the hyperlink provided to a website presenting the plain language statement and consent form prior to commencing the online questionnaire. As participants will be recruited through advertisements, participants will self-identify and select themselves to participate.

  Ethical approval has already been obtained for this research project.

  It is expected that the student taking on this project will contribute to the publication of the results of this research in the form of a peer-reviewed manuscript.

  
  

  Do Illness Representations Mediate the Relationship Between Personality and Adjustment to Multiple Sclerosis?

  Project Number: 382 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  This study aims to investigate the role of illness representations in mediating the relationships between personality and adjustment to multiple sclerosis.
  
  Participants with multiple sclerosis will be asked to complete an online survey consisting of measures to assess their personality (neuroticism and optimism), illness representations, and adjustment to multiple sclerosis (depression, anxiety, acceptance).
  
  
  Ethics approval has already been granted for this research project.
  
  It is expected that the student taking on this project will contribute to the publication of the results of this research in the form of a peer-reviewed manuscript.
  
  

  Perfectionism,m psychological distress and help-seeking attitudes among Asian international and local students and Australian-born students in Australia

  Project Number: 383 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  This research aims to compare levels of maladaptive perfectionism and its implications on mental health outcomes such as psychological distress (depression and anxiety symptoms), and help-seeking attitudes in Australian-born Caucasians and Asian international students in Australia. Few studies have examined the nature and phenomenon of perfectionism across cultures. The role of self-concealment as a potential mediator between perfectionism and psychological distress will also be explored.
  
  The rationale for this study was concerned with whether and how perfectionistic traits might increase the risk of individuals being more vulnerable to emotional difficulties and higher acculturative stressors being experienced.
  
  University students will be asked to complete an online questionnaire assessing demographics, perfectionism, psychological distress, mental health help-seeking attitudes, self-concealment and acculturative stress (in international students).
  
  It is expected that the student taking on this project will contribute to the publication of the results of this research in the form of a peer-reviewed manuscript.
  
  

  Enter the title of the Program as recorded in Themis Research Investigation of transdiagnostic factors underlying depression, anxiety, and eating disorders: A focus on cognitive inflexibility and intolerance of uncertainty

  Project Number: 384 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Mood and anxiety disorders, are prevalent conditions in people diagnosed with, cancer, MS, and eating disorders (Keski-Rahkonen & Mustelin, 2016; Stark, Kiely, Smith, Velikova, House, Selby, 2002; Thomas et al., 2006). The diagnosis, management and treatment of these conditions exposes individuals to significant life stressors, which increase their vulnerability to mood-related psychological disorders (e.g. Nagaraja, Armaiz-Pena, Lutgendorf & Sood, 2013; Hammen, 2005). Additionally, depressive disorders and anxiety disorders are frequently comorbid with each other in clinical populations, and this comorbidity is associated with greater distress, (Andrews et al., 2002), increased service utilisation (Burgess et al., 2009), and risk of suicide (Norton et al., 2008). Such findings demonstrate the complex comorbidity evident within medically unwell, and clinical populations, and highlight the importance studying comorbidity.
  
  Despite this, current treatment approaches for the treatment of anxiety, depression, and eating disorders are characterised by disorder specific treatments, many of which are forms of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) (Rohde, 2012). While there is a strong evidence-base for disorder specific treatments, increasing empirical and clinical attention has focussed on the potential utility of transdiagnostic approaches, which focus on the identification and treatment of common cognitive and behavioural mechanisms underlying the maintenance of multiple disorders (Mansell, Harvey, Watkins, & Shafran, 2009). For example, research suggests that difficulties regulating emotions, confer risk for the development of anxiety, depressive, and eating disorders; while targeting this process in treatment is associated with simultaneous improvements in anxiety, depressive and eating disorder symptoms (Sloan, Hall, Moulding, Bryce, Mildred, & Staiger, 2017).
  
  Transdiagnostic strategies, therefore, could potentially target specific mechanisms that may contribute to poorer adaptation following the diagnosis or treatment for a medical condition, as well as help target the complex clinical presentations characterised by substantial comorbidity commonly evident in treatment settings.
  
  Further understandings of the transdiagnostic factors associated with anxiety, depression, and eating disorders, for individuals with cancer, MS, clinical populations, and the general community, may help to improve mental health outcomes of a broad array of individuals. The appeal of transdiagnostic approaches are particularly evident in medically unwell populations and individuals with eating disorders due to the high rates of comorbidity, complex presentations, and systemic factors associated with treatment, all of which are likely to influence the efficacy of traditional treatment approaches (Ehrenreich-May & Chu, 2013).
  
  Participants will complete an online questionnaire hosted on Qualtrics. This questionnaire will assess: demographic information; previous or current history of any diagnosis and/or treatment for a mental disorder; previous or current history and/or treatment for MS or cancer; and measures which assess transdiagnostic factors, defined as processes which may contribute to the development or maintenance of several mental disorders, relevant to anxiety disorders, depression, and eating disorders.
• Dr Peter Koval

  Is emotion-induced blindness related to individual differences in emotional inertia

  Project Number: 391 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  Recent research has demonstrated that individual differences in the dynamics of emotions, such as their temporal autocorrelation ("emotional inertia"), are related to well-being. However, the basic cognitive/attentional processes underlying individual differences in emotion dynamics remain largely unknown. This research project will examine how individual differences in emotional inertia relate to the tendency for emotional stimuli to interfere with subsequent attentional processing, a phenomenon known as "emotion-induced blindness", using a combination of methods from attentional research and affective science. Although the association between emotional inertia and emotion-induced blindness has not yet been tested, both are thought to involve difficulty disengaging from emotional stimuli and both have been linked to worry/rumination. The current study will be the first to test the hypothesis that emotion-induced blindness may be an attentional process underlying the tendency for some people's (negative) emotions to be more self-predictable or "inert" than others. The project would suit a student interested in attention, emotion or the intersection of the two fields.

  Recommended reading:

  Koval, P., Sütterlin, S., & Kuppens, P. (2016). Emotional inertia is associated with lower well-being when controlling for differences in emotional context. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 1997.

  Berenbaum, H., Chow, P. I., Flores Jr, L. E., Schoenleber, M., Thompson, R. J., & Most, S. B. (2018). A test of the initiation–termination model of worry. Journal of Experimental Psychopathology, 9(1), 2043808718778965.

  Wang, L., Kennedy, B. L., & Most, S. B. (2012). When emotion blinds: A spatiotemporal competition account of emotion-induced blindness. Frontiers in psychology, 3, 438.

  
  

  Independent and interactive effects of processing mode and self-perspective on emotional processing of positive and negative events

  Project Number: 392 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Two parallel lines of research have investigated the outcomes of using different cognitive processing styles to reflect on distressing emotional experiences. On one hand, research by Ed Watkins and colleagues on abstract vs. concrete processing modes has demonstrated that thinking about distressing events in more specific and concrete ways results in less emotional reactivity and quicker recovery from upsetting events compared with adopting an abstract or general mode of thinking. On the other hand, Ethan Kross’s work on self-immersed vs. self-distanced perspectives has found that reflecting on upsetting experiences from a self-distanced (e.g., third person) perspective facilitates more adaptive emotional processing than thinking about such experiences from a self-immersed (e.g., first-person). Despite having similar foci, these two streams of research have not been brought together. The current project aims to combine the literatures on processing mode and self-perspective to investigate the independent and possible interactive effects of these forms of cognitive processing on emotional processing of distressing events. Furthermore, the current study will extend previous research by also examining the effects of processing mode and self-perspective on emotional processing of positive or pleasant events. Based on previous findings, it seems logical to predict that thinking about distressing events using a concrete processing mode combined with a self-distanced perspective should lead to the most adaptive emotional outcomes, whereas the combination of self-immersed and abstract processing should produce the least adaptive emotional outcomes. However, due to a lack of previous research and theory, it is unclear whether processing mode and self-perspective will have complementary effects on emotional processing of positive events.
  
  Recommended reading:
  Ayduk, Ö., & Kross, E. (2010). Analyzing negative experiences without ruminating: The role of self‐distancing in enabling adaptive self‐reflection. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4(10), 841-854.
  
  Watkins, E., Moberly, N. J., & Moulds, M. L. (2008). Processing mode causally influences emotional reactivity: Distinct effects of abstract versus concrete construal on emotional response. Emotion, 8(3), 364-378.
• Dr Simon Laham

  Psychology of morality

  Project Number: 401 Places available for this project: 3
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  In 2019 I will offer 3 projects in the psychology of morality. Specifics are yet to be determined, but projects will likely focus on (a) how people make trade-offs between moral values and (b) how liberals and conservatives approach moral judgment and decision-making.

• Associate Professor Daniel Little

  The time course of congruency effects in face perception

  Project Number: 411 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  In a composite face task, people must recognize a previously-presented top face half while ignoring the bottom face half. When the faces are aligned and upright, the to-be-ignored face can interfere with responding indicating that it cannot be completely ignored. In this task, we will use response deadlines to map out the time course of this interference. Co-supervised with Adam Osth

  
  

  The influence of distractors onserial processing

  Project Number: 412 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  People often must make decisions based on perceptual information which is based in different spatial locations. For instance, when shopping for fruit, one might seek out evidence about the ripeness of the fruit and the price. We are interested in how spatial separation affects the time course of decision making and how distracting information influence decision making.
  
  

  The influence of set size on the processing of changes

  Project Number: 413 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Current models of change detection have focused on the item capacity of visual short term memory (VSTM), and whether this is best described by a series of discrete "slots" which can hold a limited number of items, or as a limited resource which can be more flexibly allocated across multiple items. However, the way in which change detection decisions specifically are made based on information in VSTM, and the time course of decision making, has been largely over-looked. Recent work in our lab has used an extension of Systems Factorial Technology (SFT; Townsend & Nozawa, 1995) and the Logical Rules models (Fific, Little, & Nosofsky, 2010) to investigate the architecture of decision-making (i.e. whether decision making is best described as serial, parallel, or coactive) in visual scenes containing two items. However, both laboratory-based research, and change-detection in a real world setting often require monitoring of more than two items. This project will build on previous work by investigating the processing architecture of decision making in visual scenes containing more multiple items.
  
  Co-supervised with Anthea Blunden
  
  

  Recency effects in categorization of multimodal stimuli

  Project Number: 414 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Exemplar-based models provide an explanation of many phenomena in perceptual categorization. These models have been recently challenged through the claim that since exemplar models are concerned with whole objects, they cannot account for performance on tasks using bimodal stimuli (e.g., auditory and visual stimuli). This task will test the categorization of bimodal stimuli in the classic Garner task paradigm (see e.g., Nosofsky & Palmeri, 1997) and in a recent modification of that paradigm (see Little, Wang & Nosofsky, 2016).
• Dr Meredith McKague

  The role of affective connotation in learning and communicating new words in a second language

  Project Number: 421 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  How do differences in affective connotation affect the ability to learn and communicate new words in a second language?

  Most words in language have affective connotations that can be described in terms of the dimensions of valence (positive or negative connotation) and arousal (calming vs. exciting). For bilinguals and multilinguals, the affective connotations associated with words in the first language (L1) often differ from those in the second language (L2), with L1 words being associated with higher levels of arousal than their L2 translations (Pavlenko, 2008).

  Additionally, it is known that there are systematic differences between Western and Asian cultures in the affective connotations attributed to words are (e.g., Kuppens et al., 2017; Lin, 2016). For example, the word “fat” in Chinese does not carry the same negative connotation when describing a person as it does in English. In these projects, we will explore the hypothesis that a mismatch in affective connotation between words in L1 and their translation in L2 may interfere with learning and communicating new vocabulary in L2, a phenomenon we will refer to as affective interference.

  The effect of affective interference on learning and communicating new words in L2 may differ for concrete (e.g., dog) and abstract words (e.g., trust). This may be because abstract words, unlike concrete words, lack affective grounding as their meaning is acquired primarily through language rather than through direct experience. Learning of concrete concepts is associated with the embodied view which highlights how sensory-motor areas of the brain are activated in concept learning and retrieval. In other words, understanding the meaning of dog, involves motor, visual, auditory and perhaps olfactory representations of dogs. Learning of abstract concepts cannot be fully accounted for by the embodied view as abstract concepts lack physical referents (Borghi et al., 2017). In contrast, distributional models of word meaning consider how humans can learn word meanings and their associated affective connotations by tracking how words co-occur in language (e.g., De Deyne, et al., 2016; Landauer & Dumais, 1997). For example, trust might be understood from linguistic context because it is used when we talk about friendship, reliability or truth - affective connotation is inferred from language because words tend to co-occur with other words that have similar affective connotation (Lenci et al., 2018; Kousta, Vinson, & Vigliocco, 2009).

  In these projects, we will adapt existing experimental methods for indexing learning, communication, and emotional processing such as semantic priming, graphical communication (e.g., Garrod et al., 2007), and the dot-probe task, to study how bilinguals with different levels of L2 proficiency are influenced by affective interference between their L1 and L2 when learning or communicating new words in L2. The participants will be students who are native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, or Indonesian and speak English as their second language. The key manipulation will be the presence or absence of affective interference in the words that are being learned or communicated and the concreteness/abstractness of the words to be learned.

  Student Profile. You are interested in experimental and computational approaches to studying language. Programming experience is not required but would be advantageous. Some knowledge of Chinese, Japanese or Indonesian would also be a useful. During this project, you will get the opportunity to learn about natural language processing techniques and be involved in all aspects of doing research (ethics, pre-registration, participant recruitment, data-analysis, and reporting). You will use established distributional semantic models and be involved in the communication with international collaborators who will provide additional support for data-collection in non-English speakers.

  Research Environment. Your honours project will be supervised by Dr Meredith McKague, a psycholinguist with an interest in bilingualism and vocabulary acquisition, and Dr Simon De Deyne of the Complex Human Data Hub (CHDH) who is an expert in distributional models of language.

  References

  Barsalou, L. W., Santos, A., Simmons, W. K., & Wilson, C. D. (2008). Language and simulation in conceptual processing. Symbols, embodiment, and meaning, 245-283.

  Borghi, A. M., Binkofski, F., Castelfranchi, C., Cimatti, F., Scorolli, C., & Tummolini, L. (2017). The challenge of abstract concepts. Psychological Bulletin, 143(3), 263.

  De Deyne, S., Kenett, Y. N., Anaki, D., Faust, M., & Navarro, D. J. (2016). Large-scale network representations of semantics in the mental lexicon. Big data in cognitive science: From methods to insights, 174-202.

  Garrod, S., Fay, N., Lee, J., Oberlander, J., & MacLeod, T. (2007). Foundations of representation: where might graphical symbol systems come from?. Cognitive science, 31(6), 961-987.

  Kousta, S. T., Vigliocco, G., Vinson, D. P., Andrews, M., & Del Campo, E. (2011). The representation of abstract words: why emotion matters. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140, 14-34.

  Kuppens, P., Tuerlinckx, F., Yik, M., Koval, P., Coosemans, J., Zeng, K. J., & Russell, J. A. (2017). The relation between valence and arousal in subjective experience varies with personality and culture. Journal of Personality, 85, 530-542.

  Landauer, T. K., & Dumais, S. T. (1997). A solution to Plato's problem: The latent semantic analysis theory of acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge. Psychological review, 104(2), 211.

  Lenci, A., Lebani, G. E., & Passaro, L. C. (2018). The Emotions of Abstract Words: A Distributional Semantic Analysis. Topics in Cognitive Science. 1-23.

  Lim, N. (2016). Cultural differences in emotion: differences in emotional arousal level between the East and the West. Integrative Medicine Research, 5, 105-109. Pavlenko, A. (2008). Emotion and emotion-laden words in the bilingual lexicon. Bilingualism: Language and cognition, 11(2), 147-164.

• Dr Christian Nicholas

  Validating a new ‘fitbit-like’ device for the assessment of sleep.

  Project Number: 431 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: This Project will require overnight work in the sleep laboratory.
  
  

  Supervisors: Dr Christian Nicholas (Primary Internal Supervisor) & Dr Julia Chan (Internal Co-Supervisor)

  Contact: Dr Christian Nicholas cln@unimnelb.edu.au

  Project Description: Activity and fitness monitors like the ‘fit-bit’ are now in common use in the general population with a number providing feedback on how well an individual sleeps. These commercial devices, which measure movement using accelerometry, are commonly either poorly validated or not validated at all for sleep assessment. The gold standard for the objective assessment of sleep is polysomnography (PSG) which monitors brain and other physiological measures to determine sleep wake state. PSG however, is expensive and impractical to perform over multiple nights particularly in naturalistic settings. To this end research grade activity monitors (actigraphs) and sleep assessment software have been developed and validated against PSG allowing for sleep quality to be assessed objectively over multiple nights in the persons own home.

  This project aims to validate a new ‘fitbit-like’ activity monitor against an existing research grade actigraph and PSG.

  
  

  Sleep and circadian disturbances in young people at pluripotent risk for mental disorders.

  Project Number: 432 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: This Project may require you to assist with overnight work in the sleep laboratory.
  
  
  External Sleep Project @ Centre for Youth Mental Health (ORYGEN)
  Sleep and circadian disturbances in young people at pluripotent risk for mental disorders.
  Orygen Unit: PACE
  Supervisors: Dr Christian Nicholas (Primary Internal Supervisor); Dr Jessica Hartmann – Orygen (Principal External Supervisor)
  Contact: Dr Christian Nicholas cln@unimnelb.edu.au ; Jessica Hartmann jessica.hartmann@orygen.org.au

  Project Description: Sleep and circadian disturbances are a prominent clinical feature of most psychiatric disorders. These disturbances tend to predict the onset and/or recurrence of psychiatric illness and aggravate its overall course. Although sleep-wake disturbances represent a modifiable risk factor, thus providing early intervention and prevention opportunities, the role of sleep disturbance in young people with emerging mental illness is not very well documented.

  This project will be part of a larger study investigating a pluripotent at-risk mental state at Orygen Youth Health and headspace centres. It will involve, in collaboration with the sleep lab at the School for Psychological Sciences, the characterisation of sleep patterns and circadian alignment using both subjective measures (i.e. sleep diary and survey information) and objective measures (i.e. actigraphy, a non-invasive ambulatory technique to monitor rest-activity cycles).

  Potential student interested in this project should be interested in physiological measures and statistical methods. The project involves data collection, data cleaning and analysis.

• Dr Margaret Osborne

  Music psychology and performance science

  Project Number: 441 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  One of two projects in the area of music psychology and performance science may be offered.

  One project examines the relationship of self-regulated learning and performance anxiety. Optimal learning and performance in music requires a high degree of self-regulation. Self-regulated musicians strategically plan how they will control and monitor their playing when practicing and performing. Similarly, music performance anxiety can be controlled when musicians restructure their thoughts and feelings about a performance by anticipating the symptoms of their anxiety and turning them to constructive use. It has therefore been proposed that self-regulated musicians are more likely to psyche themselves up for a performance by using positive self-talk and other optimistic strategies. In contrast, musicians without these skills tend to be so afraid of failure that they deliberately think of excuses for a poor result prior to their performance. The relationship between self-regulated learning skills, performance appraisal, music performance anxiety and performance outcomes has not been specifically researched. This project will investigate these constructs in undergraduate musicians in a performance context.

  The other project broadly investigates the effect of music on emotion and performance. Listening to music can both improve and impair performance, with differential effects observed in relation to music genre and task. The relationship between music and anxiety can illuminate our understanding of the effects of music on individual performance. For example, music with slow regular beats elicits feelings of calm and lowers anxiety. Listening to rock music whilst playing a surgical board game diminishes performance in men by decreasing accuracy and speed. In contrast, while playing a video game, heavy metal songs can enhance focus, and classical music can reduce perceptions of energy for some, yet for others induce a manner of play which is clever and cautious. This project will explore the emotional states induced by music listening, the capacity of music to help people regulate performance-related emotions of anxiety and confidence, and the potential for music stimuli to enhance performance outcomes.

• Dr Adam Osth

  Developing a model of eyewitness memory decisions

  Project Number: 451 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  In eyewitness memory paradigms, participants often witness an event and are later presented with a lineup and asked to indicate a.) whether or not the target was present, b.) if the target was present, which of the members of the lineup they witnessed, and c.) their confidence in the decision. A recent sea change has occurred in the eyewitness memory literature in which formal models of decision making have completely overturned decades of established norms in the field. Specifically, the application of signal detection theory and ROC analysis has led to the conclusions that confidence is a highly reliable indicator of accuracy and that simultaneous lineups result in better accuracy than sequential lineups. The present work aims to combine confidence and latency in a model of eyewitness memory decisions. The project will consist of a relatively simple eyewitness memory paradigm where participants are presented with a lineup of only two events. Formal modeling will combine confidence and latency to test a number of competing models of eyewitness memory decisions.

  
  

  Developing a learning model in recognition memory: What is the function that relates learning to exposure?

  Project Number: 452 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Formal models of learning have often been tested using learning functions. A common functional form of learning is the exponential function, in which the amount of possible learning is always a fixed proportion of the maximum possible learning. To date, most work on learning functions has focused on improvements in performance across sessions in games or simple decisions, but has not explored how these manifest in memory tasks. The present work will consist of two experiments that test models of learning. In the first, a recognition memory task will be administered where items will be presented for varying durations that range from very fast (400 ms) to very slow (5 seconds). In the second, items will be presented for varying numbers of presentations from 1 to 6 presentations. For each dataset, latency and accuracy will be combined via the diffusion model to test different functions of learning.
• Associate Professor Jen Overbeck

  Control through connection or control through command? How control preferences shape hierarchical roles

  Project Number: 461 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  Two fundamental dimensions of human relations have been identified: a vertical dimension often labeled agency, and a horizontal dimension often labeled communality. This project examines the notion that people vary in their relative preference for agency ("command") and communality ("connection") and that their preferences for agency or communality correspond to particular ways of feeling a positive sense of control over their own fates. These different ways of pursuing a sense of control, in turn, predict how people end up in particular positions in hierarchies.

  The project will test this general framework: Upon arriving in a new group, individuals adopt role functions that are either task oriented, social oriented, neither or both--and they make these choices based on their needs for agency (which predicts more task focus) and communality (which predicts more social focus). These role function preferences, in turn, tend to be associated with particular hierarchical positions:

  1) Individuals with a dominating need for connection will seek out role functions that are social in nature because they might gain a sense of control through increasing networks ties and embeddedness within the group.

  2) Individuals with a dominating need for agency will seek out role functions that are task focused in nature because they might gain a sense of control through the increase and management of their own resources.

  3) Individuals who don't look to the group to satisfy either agency or connection needs may occupy role functions that are low in both social and task features; their sense of control would come from withholding investment to the group and thus feeling a lack of dependence on the group. Finally, 4) Individuals who have a strong need for both connection and agency will seek out both task and social role functions--a combination likely to carry high social power.

  We will design a correlational survey study and a scenario-based experimental study, both run online, to test this framework.

• Associate Professor Amy Perfors

  Visual statistical learning: The role of chunking and prior experience

  Project Number: 471 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: The student working on #2 should ideally be Chinese speaker as this will be very helpful for identifying the appropriate characters to use as stimuli and also in recruiting and interacting with Chinese-speaking participants (from the REP pool).
  
  

  This project builds on previous work in my lab investigating what factors underlie individual differences in the ability to rapidly acquire statistical information from the environment. In a typical statistical learning task, people watch stimuli (e.g., abstract shapes) which occur in a pattern (where some shapes are more likely to follow others). The ability to pick up on the underlying pattern is correlated with other kinds of learning (e.g., aspects of language learning), and is often though to reflect a domain-general intellectual skill. However, there is little to no relationship between a person's statistical learning skills in different modalities (e.g., visual or auditory), which raises a puzzle.

  My previous work has investigated the possibility that statistical learning in part reflects perceptual fluency -- the ability to rapidly encode and recall the stimuli themselves -- rather than just a domain-general factor. We found that people were indeed better able to learn the statistics if the stimuli were highly familiar, and that performance on a low-level test of perceptual fluency predicted this learning. These two honours projects seek to disentangle questions arising from this work.

  #1. One open question is whether the advantage in the previous study arose from familiarity per se, or verbaliseability (since the highly familiar stimuli were also easier to verbalise). In this project we would investigate this question by presenting people with a similar task but limit their ability to verbalise (probably by speeding it up, but this would be an issue for us to work out).

  #2. Another open question is how familiarity interacts with complexity; the previous study attempted to control for complexity but that is difficult to do for many reasons. One way to do this would be to instead keep the stimuli constant but change the people so that to some of them, they are highly familiar, and to others they are not. We propose to do this by using Chinese characters as stimuli, and determining if Chinese speakers find the statistical pattern easier to learn than English speakers.

  
  

  Misinformation and distrust: The effect of “fake news!” on trust in media

  Project Number: 472 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: Programming ability is a plus (and will facilitate the ability to do interesting extensions) but is not required.
  
  
  A great deal of research investigates why people are susceptible to misinformation and how difficult we find it to revise our ideas in response to being told that they are based on incorrect information. One of the ways people attempt to address this problem in real life is to internalise the idea that some sources are not to be trusted; however, this strategy itself may cause problems because it is difficult to identify which sources are most trustworthy. Moreover, we know relatively little about the cumulative effect of being told that many potential sources are untrustworthy: does this make people discerning consumers of information, or does it promote a sort of epistemic ennui that makes people less discerning or more likely to believe that truth itself is unknowable?
  
  This project is designed to investigate this question: what are the psychological effects of repeated assertions that information is untrustworthy? We will investigate this by presenting participants with a series of stories or vignettes. All conditions will see some stories concerning events in a fictional situation. In one condition, these will be interspersed with news items asserting that the news is fake or the sources are lying. In another, they will be interspersed with corrections. And in a control condition, they will be interspersed with news items about a second, unrelated event. Participants will be queried not only about the events in the story, but also about their larger views about trust and truth. The will then be shown a follow-up task designed to measure their ability to discern misinformation, to see if having been warned previously about fake news makes them more or less capable of doing this.
  
  

  Language evolution: The role of environment and communication

  Project Number: 473 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: Programming ability is a plus (and will facilitate the ability to do interesting extensions) but is not required.
  
  
  Previous experimental and computation work in language evolution suggests that linguistic and conceptual systems tend to evolve so that they are on an “optimal frontier” that balances between simplicity (ease of learning) and expressiveness (the need probability for that concept). We plan on investigating this by having people learn simple novel concepts by being given examples (with labels) on a computer. After they learn, they are asked to label others. Their output is then given as input to the next participant. Over time, this creates a “chain” of evolution in which the actual concepts and labels change. We will manipulate different factors that might shape need probability in order to explore how those factors shape the system that emerges by the end of the chain. Two factors that we have identified are:
  
  #1. Need might be driven by the utility of the thing being expressed. For instance, it might be more important to have a word for “tiger” because it is important to know when a tiger is lurking nearby waiting to eat you, while it might be less important to have a word for a minor plant that nobody cares about. We will manipulate this by giving people different amount of points for getting specific items right, and exploring whether the final evolved system shapes itself around the high-point items.
  
  #2. Need might be driven by the communicative priority of the items. Other people might simply talk about tigers more often than lions, or you might be called upon to talk about them more, regardless of how dangerous either is.We will manipulate this by making people give labels for some items more than others, and exploring whether the final evolved system shapes itself around the high-frequency items.
  
  This project is envisioned as being run in conjunction with A/Prof Charles Kemp and one other honours student. The student working with me will explore factor #1 while the one working with Charles will explore factor #2. Where appropriate, we will all four meet together in order to develop our ideas in tandem and ensure that the projects complement each other.
• Professor Lisa Phillips

  An exploration of core beliefs associated with social anxiety, fear of negative evaluation and depression

  Project Number: 481 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  The transdiagnostic model of psychopathology suggests that there are common underlying features that contribute to comorbidity between various presentations of mental ill-health. Potential shared common features of anxiety and depression is most commonly cited in discussions of this model. Fear of negative evaluation (FNE) is a cognitive process that is most commonly associated with social anxiety, but which has also found to be elevated in relation to depression. This study will explore whether core beliefs can be identified that are related to FNE that account for some of the comorbidity between social anxiety and depression. The study will be conducted with first year psychology students who report elevated levels of social anxiety. The co-supervisor for this project with be Sarina Cook- a PhD student in the School.

  
  

  Predictors of social inclusion in young people with psychosis

  Project Number: 482 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Social inclusion is a contemporary construct which is receiving growing interest in psychiatric literature (Gardner, Filia, Killackey, and Cotton, in press). It comprises both objective and subjective components. There is a lack of understanding about the importance of social inclusion for young people experiencing their first episode of psychosis. We have collected data on 150 young people with early stage psychotic disorder including measures of social inclusion, connectedness, loneliness, quality of life and wellbeing. We are interested in identifying predictors of social inclusion within this group. It is expected that the student will collect additional data to add to the existing dataset. This will require an ethics amendment.Co-supervisors will be Prof Sue Cotton and Dr Kate Filia- Orygen- the National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health.
• Dr Geoffrey Saw

  Forecasting the future using the wisdom of crowds

  Project Number: 491 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  The so-called “wisdom of the crowd” phenomenon traditionally relates to scenarios in which individuals make independent estimates about some single quantity (e.g. each participant in a competition independently guesses the number of jellybeans in a jar), and these estimates are aggregated. In such contexts taking the simple average of the crowd’s estimates has been shown to be a remarkably successful strategy, and often exceeds the performance of the single most skilled member of the crowd.

  More recently, this approach has been extended to new domains, such as the forecasting of geopolitical and other events. A major impetus to this application of the wisdom of crowds to new domains was a 2011-2015 geopolitical forecasting tournament sponsored by the USA’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. The winner of the tournament was Philip Tetlock’s “Good Judgment Group”. Tetlock subsequently produced a book explaining some of their methods (Tetlock & Gardner, 2016).

  The project will relate to the development and extension of models for the aggregation of human judgments within the domain of forecasting.

  Here is some optional background reading.

  Book chapters Steyvers, M., & Miller, B. (2015). Cognition and Collective Intelligence. Handbook of Collective Intelligence, 119. Chicago. Viewable at http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/papers/CIChapter_SteyversMiller.pdf

  Journal articles

  Galton, F. (1907). Vox populi (The wisdom of crowds). Nature, 75(7), 450-451. Lee, M. D., & Lee, M. N. (2017). The relationship between crowd majority and accuracy for binary decisions. Judgment & Decision Making, 12(4). Viewable at http://journal.sjdm.org/17/17406/jdm17406.pdf

  Prelec, D., Seung, H. S., & McCoy, J. (2017). A solution to the single-question crowd wisdom problem. Nature, 541(7T638), 532-535. See also https://www.nature.com/news/how-to-find-the-right-answer-when-the-wisdom-of-the-crowd-fails-1.21370

  Trade books

  Surowiecki, J. (2005). The wisdom of crowds. Anchor. Tetlock, P. E., & Gardner, D. (2016). Superforecasting: The art and science of prediction. Random House.

• Dr Julian Simmons

  MSPS Microbiome and Mental Health Initiative project – Exploring associations between the salivary microbiome and health and life-style factors in Victorians: a Museums Victoria partnership.

  Project Number: 501 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: Data collection, good interpersonal skills and flexibility in availability (e.g., available on weekends) will be essential criteria. Students must contact Dr Julian Simmons (jgs@unimelb.edu.au) and meet to discuss the project prior to selection of preferences.
  
  

  One place is available for a project in collaboration Dr Orli Schwartz (CYMH). The vertebrate microbiome, i.e., bacteria that lives within and on the body, plays both a central and critical role in normative physiological function. While many bacteria appear benign, and others pathogenic, many serve a commensal or mutualistic symbiotic role (i.e., provide benefit to the host). An altered, or ‘dysbiotic’ microbiome has been linked with a range of disorders, including gastrointestinal disorders (FGID), and mental health disorders, such as depression and anxiety. Nonetheless, experimental evidence is scant, and particularly explicating underlying relationships in methodologically sound studies. The purpose of this project will be to examine links in a cohort of approximately 800 visitors to the Melbourne Museum in 2019, who will provide a saliva sample, and anthropometric and self-report data on relevant indicators. Data collection, good interpersonal skills and flexibility in availability (e.g., available on weekends) will be essential criteria.

  
  

  Investigating the effects of child maltreatment on the development of hippocampal sub regions in middle childhood in the Families and Childhood Transitions Study (FACTS).

  Project Number: 502 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: Brain image (MRI) data processing will be required, and some experience with coding and/or neuroanatomy is essential. Students must contact Dr Julian Simmons (jgs@unimelb.edu.au) and meet to discuss the project prior to selection of preferences.
  
  
  One place is available for a project in collaboration with A/Prof Sarah Whittle (Department of Psychiatry). Adverse childhood environments represent an important risk factor for the development of psychopathology later in life, and there is accumulating evidence that neurobiological changes may partially mediate this relationship. It is well established that childhood maltreatment (CM) has a detrimental impact on the brain, with many studies implicating the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a functionally and structurally heterogeneous region, and little is known about how maltreatment might affect hippocampal subfield development through childhood and adolescence. In earlier work, we have demonstrated that the development of both total hippocampal volume, and specific sub-regions, are associated with CM from early to late adolescence. This suggest that specific hippocampal sub-regions may be particularly vulnerable to the influence of CM. The purpose of this project will be to examine these links in younger children, with a cohort of approximately 140 children who have been assessed at two time points, at age 8 and age 10. Brain image (MRI) data processing will be required, and some experience with coding is essential.
• Associate Professor Luke Smillie

  Personality, Prosociality, and Morality

  Project Number: 511 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  This collaboration between Simon Laham and I reflects our converging interests in how personality traits link with moral and prosocial behaviour. There is flexibility regarding the research question. As two examples, one potential project could examine individual differences in the ‘identifiable victim’ effect. This is a phenomenon whereby people tend to offer larger charitable donations to a single, predetermined, personalised (i.e., ‘identifiable’) benefactor as opposed to a group of benefactors (Kogut & Ritov, 2005a, 2005b), an undetermined benefactors (Small & Lowenstein, 2003), or an anonymous benefactors (Kogut & Ritov, 2005a, 2005b). Another potential project could expand on our recent findings showing how personality traits influence moral judgements. In particular, we find that individuals who are intellectually curious and engaged are more inclined to judge the morality of an action based on its consequences. Conversely, individuals who are polite and respectful of social norms are inclined to judge the morality of an action based on its inherent rightness or wrongness, regardless of its consequences.

  Suggested reading:

  Lee, S. & Hugh Feeley, T. (2016). The identifiable victim effect: a meta-analytic review. Social Influence, 11.

  Smillie, L. D. Zhao, K., Lawn, E. C. R., Perry, R. & Laham, S. M. (in press). Prosociality and Morality through the Lens of Personality Psychology. Australian Journal of Psychology.

  
  

  Individual difference in hallucination proneness and sensory processing

  Project Number: 512 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  This collaboration between Simon Cropper and I reflects our converging interests over the past few years. Both labs have recently shown the important role that personality traits and related individual differences play in some of the most basic sensory processes that contribute to cognition (Antinori et al., 2016, 2017; Partos et al, 2016). This project, potentially for two or more students, will further examine the role that an individual’s personality plays in the way in which we sense the world and then respond to it. We aim to use the behavioural paradigms we have established to examine exactly what aspects of an individual’s personality contribute to the construction of the resultant meaningful percept.
  
  Suggested reading:
  
  Antinori, A., Carter, O., & Smillie, L. D. (2017). Seeing it both ways: Openness to experience and binocular rivalry suppression. Journal of Research in Personality, 68, 15-22. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2017.03.005
  
  Partos, T. R., Cropper, S. J., & Rawlings, D. (2016). You Don't See What I See: Individual Differences in the Perception of Meaning from Visual Stimuli. PLoS One, 11(3), e0150615. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0150615
  
  

  Neural correlates of personality

  Project Number: 513 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: May involve data collection on weekends.
  
  
  This project will examine personality traits in relation to EEG-derived measures of neural processes. There is flexibility regarding the research question. As two examples, one potential project might examine relations between personality and parameters based on alpha frequencies, which have been linked with cognitive and motivational processing. Another project might seek to replicate our recent findings using machine learning to predict personality traits from neural activity. Either project would provide training in EEG data collection and analysis, as well as offering an introduction to theory and research in personality neuroscience.
  
  Suggested reading:
  
  Corcoran, A. W., Alday, P. M., Schlesewsky, M. & Bornkessel‐Schlesewsky, I. (2018). Toward a reliable, automated method of individual alpha frequency (IAF) quantification. Psychophysiology.
  
  Wacker, J. & Smillie, L. D. (2015). Trait extraversion and dopamine function. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 9 (6), 225–238.
• Professor Philip Smith

  Resilience and Adversity in Negotiation

  Project Number: 521 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  In collaboration with Professor Mara Olekalns of the Melbourne Business School

  In 2019, we will offer two negotiation projects focusing on adversity and resilience in negotiation. This research focuses on how negotiators respond to unexpected, potentially adverse, events that interrupt to flow of a negotiation. Such events have the potential to derail a negotiation, making agreement more difficult. Using laboratory-based experiments, we will investigate the whether negotiators who are able to adapt and ‘bounce back’ from adverse events are more likely to successfully conclude negotiations. Research projects will focus on the relationship characteristics that can buffer individuals from the impact of such events and the cognitive reappraisal techniques than can help them overcome events once they have occurred.

  
  

  Computational Modelling of Visual Working Memory

  Project Number: 522 Places available for this project: 2
  Special Requirements for this project: Students undertaking these projects are strongly encouraged to take the elective subject PSYC40012, Models of Psychological Processes, in second semester. This subject covers material that will be useful to students working in this area.
  
  
  In collaboration with Dr Simon Lilburn, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
  
  Visual working memory is a limited-capacity memory system that plays an important role in the translation of perception into action. An important question in cognitive psychology is how the quality of memory representations change as the number of items stored in memory increases. The research in our laboratory develops and tests a model of visual working memory derived from signal detection theory that predicts memory performance on sets of multiple items from performance on single items. In 2019 we will offer two projects that investigate memory performance for items comprised of multiple features. We will use computational modelling methods to test between feature-load and object-load models of the capacity of visual working memory.
• Dr Yi Ting Tan

  A latent profile analysis of singing proficiency phenotypes in the general population

  Project Number: 531 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  Supervisors: Dr Yi Ting Tan and Professor Sarah Wilson

  All humans possess an endogenous musical instrument: our vocal apparatus. People from all known human cultures sing, and the ability to sing emerges spontaneously from infancy. However, singing ability seems to vary across the general population and it is likely that a variety of singing proficiency phenotypes exist. To date, no research in this field has attempted to characterise singing proficiency phenotypes using a statistically rigorous method. The purpose of this project is to fill the gap in the literature by using latent profile analysis (LPA) to identify typical singing proficiency phenotypes in a large sample. (The singing data have already been collected and the singing accuracy has been measured objectively using a number of absolute and relative pitch accuracy measures for an existing project). Superior over traditional cluster analyses, LPA is a model-based approach that utilises rigorous fit statistics criteria to determine the best cluster solutions balancing fit and parsimony. Precise phenotyping of different profiles of singing proficiency will be crucial for uncovering the genetic determinants of singing ability. Another aim of the project is to examine the relationship between various singing proficiency phenotypes and potential predictor variables (e.g., music training, pitch perception ability and levels of past and present singing and music engagement). Understanding how certain variables may be associated with the different singing proficiency phenotypes can shed light on possible intervention measures that can improve singing accuracy outcomes.

• Dr Nicholas Van Dam

  Effects of anxiety on risky and uncertain decision-making processes

  Project Number: 541 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  

  Prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) has provided an important conceptual framework for computing the ways that people make decisions in relation to risk and uncertainty. Recent extensions of this work into the realm of ambiguous outcomes have provided interesting insights into individual differences with respect to attitudes towards risk, loss, and ambiguity. The ability to examine these individual differences in an objective way, via computational modeling of actual choices has considerable promise for understanding psychiatric conditions such as anxiety and depression (see e.g., work by Oliver Robinson, Ifat Levy). Most literature suggests that anxious individuals are generally risk-averse, though there is some evidence to suggest that they may also be loss averse. Moreover, we know from clinical assessments that anxious individuals are very uncomfortable with uncertainty (intolerance of uncertainty) and tend to interpret ambiguity pessimistically. Despite this knowledge, evidence regarding attitudes to ambiguity is mixed, with key recent results suggesting that individuals with Post-traumatic stress disorder are averse to ambiguous conditions under loss but not gains. Unpublished data from my lab suggests that anxious individuals may also be less risk and ambiguity averse when there are no possible losses. The proposed project would entail analysis (i.e., fitting of a computational model) of 3 existing datasets, 2 of which were collected in person with clinical samples (reward-only), 1 of which was collected online (reward-only, reward+loss). It would also entail collection and analysis of new data in REP using a developed paradigm (one that invokes the Ellsberg Paradox) with different monetary incentive schemes (reward-only, loss-only, reward+loss).

  
  

  Improving the measurement of repetitive negative thought (e.g., rumination and worry)

  Project Number: 542 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Repetitive negative thinking (RNT), a type of thinking about past, present, and future that is excessive, persistent, and generally pessimistic, is a common process among mood and anxiety disorders. Evidence suggests that it complicates treatment and decreases the likelihood of recovery. The most studied forms of RNT are rumination and worry, commonly measured using the Ruminative Responses Scale (RRS) and the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ), respectively. Mounting evidence suggests that rumination and worry share a number of common features, though the means by which we commonly measure these constructs may create the illusion of orthogonality. Psychometric explorations of the RRS and PSWQ suggest these measures may tap similar constructs, but the instructional sets and item stems may reflect disorder-specific RNT, preventing their ability to adequately capture disorder-independent RNT. The proposed project entails the validation of a scale developed by my lab (the Repetitive Negative Thought Questionnaire; RNTQ), a 34-item scale designed to measure RNT as a general and specific construct (subscales include measures of Worry, Brooding, Interference, Overthinking, and Dwelling), with promising initial psychometric properties. The scale was developed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis across 2 (or 3) separate datasets (with approximately 400 participants each). Additionally, data has been collected in a large heterogenous convenience sample (n>700) and in a clinical sample of patients with serious mental illness and a history of depression (n > 200). The present project would include psychometric analysis of existing data, as well as the collection of additional data online (e.g., MTurk, REP) for validation. Although the project entails the use of several datasets, the same analytic approaches will be used across datasets, minimizing the need for additional work (especially through the use of code in R).
  
  

  Reducing bias in mindfulness measurement

  Project Number: 543 Places available for this project: 1
  Special Requirements for this project: None
  
  
  Mindfulness has exhibited an exponential growth in popularity among the public, media, and in scientific research. Much research in this area implements self-report scales that claim to measure one's perception of how mindful they are or are not. My colleagues and I have published a number of studies showing that some of the most popular mindfulness scales exhibit response biases (i.e., the way the items are worded influences the way that people endorse them). Despite a number of warnings, scales such as the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) continue to be widely popular, likely because there have been few suggestions for how to improve measurement of the idea of mindfulness. Using existing, large datasets (n>25,000), my lab is exploring the extent to which response biases influence the validity of the FFMQ. We have also worked with colleagues to create a new measure, which attempts to minimise the wording biases. The proposed project would explore the psychometric properties of this new scale, in addition to examining whether the scale can be changed a by brief mindfulness (but not a control) mindfulness exercise.