Psychology

Project description

The university years are vital for determining the education and future careers of young people who hope to gain a qualification and access to employment. In more subtle ways, universities also provide a context for young people to learn to socialise across a diverse community, clarify their values, and establish a sense of their own place in the world. Disruptions in this period of young people’s lives not only have significant implications for individuals, but for societies, as a new generation takes their place as the thought leaders and decision makers of the future.
This summer scholarship will contribute to a programme of research exploring the mental wellbeing of marginalised student groups in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ), framed through the pivotal concept of ‘belonging.’ In particular this contribution will focus on exploration into Māori Tauira Belonging and Mental Wellbeing.

Overarching research questions:

1. How do university students from indigenous communities (Māori) experience belonging at university in Aotearoa New Zealand.
2. How do these students understand the impact of belonging (or marginalisation) on their mental wellbeing?
3. What are the implications of this for a ‘whole university’ approach to improving the mental wellbeing of indigenous students.

They will assist with analysing existing qualitative data exploring Māori Tauira Belonging and Mental Wellbeing The tauira will produce a journal article style piece at the conclusion of the Summer scholarship.

We envisage a tauira Māori scholar with experience in qualitative data analysis and academic writing.

Project description

Directly engaging in conflict, even when it involves anger and hostility, helps to resolve problems and thus improves close relationships. These benefits call for changes to therapeutic approaches that focus on softening conflict. However, research examining the benefits of relationship conflict focuses only on adult outcomes and ignores the harm inter-parental conflict has for children by spilling over to parent-child interactions and reducing parents’ responsiveness. This project examines the costs and benefits of inter-parental conflict for both parents and children by examining the degree to which parents can engage in conflict to improve problems and then emotionally and behaviourally recover from conflict (conflict recovery) to be responsive to their children.

This project will involve testing how different ways parents behave during conflict interactions spill over to parents’ responsiveness during subsequent family interactions. A key task will be to code outcomes of this process, including children’s emotion regulation during emotionally relevant tasks. The summer scholar will complete behavioural coding as part of a team working on this large family-based project. The resulting data will be used to test the role of conflict engagement and recovery in enhancing children’s emotion regulation.

Project description

Tangata ako ana i te whare, te turanga ki te marae, tau ana - ‘A person who is taught at home will stand collected on the marae.’

The message this proverb carries is culturally universal: early caregiving experiences provide the foundation on which children grow into competent, integrated members of society. Indeed, caregivers provide the necessary scaffolding with which infants build early competencies that ultimately shape their life-long social, emotional, language and cognitive functioning. Central to this scaffolding is caregiver responsiveness - the ways in which caregivers are sensitive to their child’s ongoing behaviour, and make adjustments to maintain the bidirectional “interaction loops” that characterise early caregiver-infant interactions. However, current understanding is one-sided due to a significant barrier: infant behaviour cannot be manipulated. Here we present an innovative solution; a hyper-realistic computer-generated psychobiological simulation of a human infant (BabyX).

This project will involve working with the research team in our new studies with BabyX and co-develop culturally nuanced coding schedules to capture caregiver responsiveness in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and co-develop procedures for in-depth caregiver interviews in future work. It is our hope that the summer student will continue their involvement in the project as they pursue their PG studies.

The student who works on this project will also help running experimental sessions with infants and/or children in the Early Learning Lab (City Campus, School of Psychology). This may involve being available on certain weekends.

The student will receive training on other research tasks such as scheduling appointments, participant recruitment, conducting literature reviews, data entry, data coding, and data analysis. The student will have an opportunity to help with other projects in the lab. Importantly, the student who works on this project will be involved in a thriving lab group over the summer months. Our group will have regular lab meetings in which we read recent articles in developmental science and have exciting discussions on topics relevant to the work in the lab. As you can see, this project will provide the student with a very unique experience; they will be exposed to every stage of research in developmental science.

Experience with infants, children, and or caregivers of young children would be helpful. Students involved will need to complete a confidentiality agreement.

Project description

Tangata ako ana i te whare, te turanga ki te marae, tau ana - ‘A person who is taught at home will stand collected on the marae.’

The message this proverb carries is culturally universal: early caregiving experiences provide the foundation on which children grow into competent, integrated members of society. Indeed, caregivers provide the necessary scaffolding with which infants build early competencies that ultimately shape their life-long social, emotional, language and cognitive functioning. Central to this scaffolding is caregiver responsiveness - the ways in which caregivers are sensitive to their child’s ongoing behaviour, and make adjustments to maintain the bidirectional “interaction loops” that characterise early caregiver-infant interactions. However, current understanding is one-sided due to a significant barrier: infant behaviour cannot be manipulated. Here we present an innovative solution; a hyper-realistic computer-generated psychobiological simulation of a human infant (BabyX).

This project will involve working with the research team in our new studies with BabyX and co-develop culturally nuanced coding schedules to capture caregiver responsiveness in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and co-develop procedures for in-depth caregiver interviews in future work. It is our hope that the summer student will continue their involvement in the project as they pursue their PG studies.

The student who works on this project will also help running experimental sessions with infants and/or children in the Early Learning Lab (City Campus, School of Psychology). This may involve being available on certain weekends.

The student will receive training on other research tasks such as scheduling appointments, participant recruitment, conducting literature reviews, data entry, data coding, and data analysis. The student will have an opportunity to help with other projects in the lab. Importantly, the student who works on this project will be involved in a thriving lab group over the summer months. Our group will have regular lab meetings in which we read recent articles in developmental science and have exciting discussions on topics relevant to the work in the lab. As you can see, this project will provide the student with a very unique experience; they will be exposed to every stage of research in developmental science.

Experience with infants, children, and or caregivers of young children would be helpful. Students involved will need to complete a confidentiality agreement.

Project description

The ability to work together with other people underpins much of our everyday lives and develops substantially across early childhood. Although there is substantial evidence documenting the early development of cooperation across the early years, much is known about how children’s prior interactions with a social partner influences their capacity to cooperate with that social partner in subsequent tasks.

This project will examine how children’s emotions and emotion regulation in emotionally charged interactions with a social partner influence their ability to work together with that partner in a subsequent task. This project is a part of a broader longitudinal study looking at family and child resilience and wellbeing.

The student who works on this project will complete behavioural coding of child-experimenter social interactions in our research space at the University of Auckland, City Campus. The student who works on this project may also help running experimental sessions with infants and/or children in the Early Learning Lab (City Campus, School of Psychology), which may involve being available on certain weekends.

The student may receive training on other research tasks such as scheduling appointments, participant recruitment, conducting literature reviews, data entry, data coding, and data analysis.

Importantly, the student who works on this project will be involved in a thriving lab group over the summer months. Our group will have regular lab meetings in which we read recent articles in developmental science and have exciting discussions on topics relevant to the work in the lab. As you can see, this project will provide the student with a very unique experience; they will be exposed to every stage of research in developmental science.

Experience with infants, children, and or caregivers of young children would be helpful. Students involved will need to complete a confidentiality agreement.

Project description

This project asks what infants understand about the music and other sounds they hear, such as melodies, rhythms, and harmonies. The study is quick and fun for an infant and parent; the infant watches a short video that includes different characters singing songs and we record their eye movements, heart rate, and electrodermal activity to determine whether they find certain sounds more surprising or unusual than others. This helps us to figure out whether infant auditory perception is similar to adult auditory perception, even though infants have a lot less experience of the world than adults have.

The student who works on this project will gain experience working with infants and families in a developmental science lab, will help with participant recruitment, data collection, and (if interested) some video editing/processing and data analysis. Experience with infants or children would be helpful, but not required.

If you are interested in working on this project, email the supervisor (sam@auckland.ac.nz) to request a meeting. Only candidates who have prior approval can be considered for this role. One or two positions are available. Sam would need to interview them and approve beforehand.

Project description

Animals living in captivity – pets, laboratory animals, and farm animals – often experience less stimulating environments than those living in the wild. Enrichment is a way to improve the quality of captive animal care by providing stimulating environmental conditions which promote psychological and physical wellbeing. A successful enrichment initiative requires understanding what an animal wants, and what behaviours are important for an animal’s wellbeing. This project seeks to investigate the responses and preferences of pigeons and lambs living in captive environments toward different environmental enrichment strategies. Students will analyse data from video footage, and review relevant literature. Students will also assist with husbandry and monitoring of laboratory pigeons.

The project will involve working closely with pigeons; full training will be provided, but prospective applicants must not have any allergies etc. which would prevent them from being in close proximity of pigeons. Having taken a course(s) in learning and behaviour/behavioural psychology/experimental analysis of behaviour would be ideal, but is not a prerequisite. Some familiarity with computer programming (e.g., Python) would be a bonus but is also not a prerequisite.

Project description

Sub-optimal choice comes in many forms, including a tendency to choose options with a lower probability of reward but with cues that signal whether or not a reward will occur over options associated with a higher probability of reward but no cues, a tendency to choose a smaller-sooner reward over a larger-later one, and a tendency to divide one’s time between alternatives in a way that does not reflect the relative availability of rewards for those behaviours. These patterns of sub-optimal choice have been associated with poor outcomes in life, including various forms of addiction and psychological disorders.

This project involves assisting with the running and analysis of experiments investigating pigeon models of sub-optimal choice situations. Students will gain experience in working in a research laboratory, including assisting with animal husbandry, monitoring and analysing data, and potentially testing and setting up experiments.

The project will involve working closely with pigeons; full training will be provided, but prospective applicants must not have any allergies etc. which would prevent them from being in close proximity of pigeons. Having taken a course(s) in learning and behaviour/behavioural psychology/experimental analysis of behaviour would be ideal, but is not a prerequisite. Some familiarity with computer programming (e.g., Python) would be an advantage but is also not a prerequisite.

Project description

Why are music and language found in all societies, but in such diverse forms? For this project, students will help to recruit participants speaking NZ English, te reo Māori, and potentially other languages to sing, speak, and/or play instrumental music and analyze the resulting acoustic and behavioural data. Understanding and experience with te reo Māori / te ao Māori, running behavioural experiments, and/or analysing acoustic data are helpful but not necessarily essential. We are aiming to recruit a Māori student.
If you are interested, please reach out EARLY to one or more of the supervisors via email (patrick.savage@auckland.ac.nz, sc.purdy@auckland.ac.nz, atua.parkinson@auckland.ac.nz) to discuss the project to give us time to interview potential candidates.

Project description

If asked to state (fast and accurately) how many eggs are in the basket, or people are in the room, you might think that we should count. But it turns out that counting is only one way and, depending on the actual number, not even the preferred way. Further, number judgments can be distorted by totally irrelevant dimensions (such as variations in colour, orientation, density, shape, or motion). This project investigates why this should be so. Depending on skills and interest, the student will be invited to develop some experimental scenarios to investigate, using available software and materials. The project would suit a student interested in or with some background in cognitive psychology or neuroscience.

Project description

Many business leaders have been obsessed with a one-dimensional focus on bottom-line outcomes while neglecting other considerations (e.g., ethics), a phenomenon referred to as having a bottom-line mentality (BLM). While some research shows that BLM can direct employees to bottom-line objectives and work harder, leading to higher performance; some other research views such mentality as disruptive to employees’ functioning, leading to lower performance. Therefore, the relationship between BLM and performance warrants a systematic exploration.

The primary aim of this project is to systematically review and synthesise existing research to understand the relationship between bottom-line mentality and various dimensions of performance, such as task performance, contextual performance, and counterproductive work behaviours.

The student who works on this project will conduct a comprehensive literature search to identify the relevant studies, extract and code data from the studies, and perform a meta-analysis.

Project description

Psychological constructs are necessary abstractions to operationalize otherwise intractable entities. However, the way constructs are defined and refined over time introduces notable bias into models of behaviour, which prevents effective knowledge building within and across subfields.

In this project, the student will help develop a strategy to to assess the psychometric structure linking constructs to one another. They will help with search, coding, and analysis of current data.

The project would suit a student interested in or with some background in cognitive psychology/neuroscience and computer science/statistics.

Project description

This project will work with data from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS) to examine mental health and wellbeing in young men. The NZAVS is a large national probability panel study of more than 70,000 New Zealand residents. The successful candidate will work as part of a research team and help process and enter data from the latest wave of NZAVS. The project will then use this data to look at levels of mental health, wellbeing, optimism, expectations of future security, political engagement and other similar variables in young men today relative to young men who completed the NZAVS in previous years. The overall goal of the summer studentship will be to write a report documenting rates of mental health in young men in New Zealand in 2024/2025 relative to young men in previous generations.

This project would suit a student interested in social or clinical psychology, and ideally with a background or joint major in statistics.

If you are interested in working on this project please email me so we can chat before you apply (c.sibley@auckland.ac.nz).

Project description

Virtual Reality presents exciting new opportunities to study how processes across perception, cognition, and action unfold and interact. Our lab uses VR headsets and high-speed motion-tracking cameras to record participants’ hand, eye, and body movements as they perform tasks designed to measure fundamental aspects of attention, executive control, and memory. For example, this summer we plan to use VR to investigate how ADHD impacts attention in a task known as the Attentional Network Test.

In this project, the student will work alongside Dr. Erb and post-graduate students to run experimental sessions with participants, process hand- and eye-tracking data, and learn some of the basics of data analysis. The student will have the opportunity to select from several studies running in the lab, so the experience can be tailored to the student’s particular interests.

Finally, our lab is seeking to build partnerships with local museums to do data collection within the community. Consequently, the student may also have the opportunity to spend a portion of their time outside of the lab, bringing VR research games to members of the community.

If you are interested in this project, please feel free to email Dr. Erb at the email address provided above.

Project description

Positive links have been demonstrated between mental health literacy (MHL) and mental health and wellbeing outcomes. Evidence also suggests that measuring MHL is crucial to promoting mental health care, particularly for populations more vulnerable to mental health concerns. This is important given the overrepresentation of Pacific
peoples in mental health statistics. Therefore, this project aims to develop a culturally appropriate and relevant psychometric Pasifika MHL measurement tool in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand. A Pasifika MHL measure has the potential to offer an efficient and meaningful way to provide insight into the mental health beliefs, knowledge,
attitudes, and help-seeking behaviours of Pacific peoples. The Pasifika MHL measurement tool can be used to support Pacific mental health by providing a way to regularly monitor the MHL of our communities and by generating an evidence base to inform areas such as policy, health promotion, education, and the intervention and
prevention space.

The project
The project is a mixed methods Pacific research project involving survey and talanoa methodologies that explores Pasifika Mental Health Literacy in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Scholar’s work
As a summer scholar, you will be guided by Pacific knowledges and methodologies to undertake a systematic literature review and data processing and analysis that will contribute to a published report on Pasifika Mental Health Literacy in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Required skills/pre-requisites
The ideal candidate will be of Pacific Island Descent, have a strong interest in Pacific health and wellbeing and/or Pacific research, have strong communication and writing skills, be highly organised and can work independently.

Timing
Starting at an agreed date after exams with weekly fono with the supervisor and a three-week break over the Christmas and New Year period.

Benefits
The project will have academic, intellectual, and practical benefits for the summer scholar.

This project is also eligible for a scholarship under Ngā Motu Whakahī.

Project description

Following the recent (i.e., 2020) decriminalisation of abortion in Aotearoa, attitudes toward reproductive rights have become increasingly politicised. This project will leverage data from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS) to examine differences in abortion support across a range of health care professionals (e.g., nurses, doctors, Plunket nurses, etc.). Because the NZAVS is comprised of over 70,000 New Zealand residents randomly sampled from the Electoral Roll, we have the unique opportunity to examine abortion attitudes amongst a subsample who work within the health care system. Given the critical role that these health care professionals play in informing patients about their reproductive rights, identifying any differences in abortion support across these professions will have important implications for understanding potential barriers to abortion access.

Students who receive a scholarship to work on this project will be involved in a variety of tasks that help us address this critical research question. Specifically, students’ responsibilities will include data entry, scanning of completed surveys, and other aspects of the data collection process. At the end of the semester, the successful student will be involved in the creation of an empirical report the lab will submit for publication. Students will gain skills in the following areas: (a) data analyses, (b) data entry, (c) the composition of scientific reports, and (d) the management of a large database.

This project would suit a student interested in social or political psychology. No prior research experience is required.

Project description

Who are young people today? What is important to them? And who and what has helped them to get to where they are now? Understanding adolescent identity and development is one component of promoting wellbeing in young people in Aotearoa.

The Our Voices project (funded by MBIE) collected data contributing to understandings of young people’s lived experiences of wellbeing in contemporary Aotearoa. The Tō Mātou Rerenga – Our Journey app was developed in collaboration with young people and resulted in the collection of large-scale, multi-modal (free-text, images, audio and video) qualitative data.

The student who works on this project will code parts of the qualitative data to develop key themes that capture the lived experiences of young people related to wellbeing and development in certain areas of their lives, such as school experiences and interpersonal relationships, parent expectations and thoughts about society. There will likely be some flexibility as to what the student focuses on depending on their interests and knowledge base.

There may also be the opportunity to contribute to an academic journal article. This project will provide the student with the opportunity to gain a valuable experience working with a novel and complex qualitative dataset.  

Project description

Conversations between parents and their children about recent setbacks and failures play a crucial role in helping a child develop resilience and manage future challenges. This summer scholar project will utilise data from the Growing Up in NZ study, focusing on real-world conversations between parents and their children about everyday challenges, such as not doing as well in sports games or school work as the child had hoped.
Extending a recent study , this project will use data from two Growing up in NZ data collection waves to explore how parent-child conversations with 8-year-olds relate to their child’s resilience at age 12, offering a crucial longitudinal perspective.
As a summer scholar, you will be deeply involved in transcribing and coding additional parent child conversations and helping code and explore a wide range of typical conversational features relate to the development of children’s resilience over time. There may also be the opportunity to contribute to an academic journal article on the topic.
This project offers hands-on experience with data from a large longitudinal NZ study, enabling you to contribute to findings that inform parents and educators about the conversational features most supportive of children's resilience development. This is an excellent opportunity to enhance your qualitative research skills and to advance our understanding of how everyday conversations with kids matter.  You will also have the opportunity to work along other scholars working on Growing Up in NZ projects.
Required skills/pre-requisites: Ability to transcribe audio recordings of spoken interactions in English with a high level of accuracy. Some conversations may be more challenging to hear and involve tuning into different voices and accents, which may be more difficult for those less familiar with the variety of English language accents in New Zealand.