On 8th March 2023, FCRG held an event for PhD students to present their ongoing research. FCRG and other members of the School of Psychology & Counselling attended the session which was organised by FCRG Leads Dr Lara Frumkin and Dr Ailsa Strathie with support and funding provided by the OPRC.
The event included four invited speakers, Andrei Vaida, Ashley Bennett, Deepti Ramaswamy and Simon Pavitt, all at different points in their PhD journey. Each speaker was invited to present on findings from their latest research and to engage in dialogue with strand members on friendly critique and next steps on their work.
The first speaker was Andrei Vaida who spoke about his work on ‘Developing computerised tasks for assessing affective state’. His presentation considered how the use of the concept of cognitive affective bias as the foundation for the creation of a computerised task. Andrei talked about his data which shows that cognitive affective bias can be used translationally to assess people’s vulnerability towards developing depression as well as other affective disorders.
Ashleigh Bennett presented next with a talk titled ‘Prototypes and Stereotypes – understanding the ‘ideal’ tactical and firearms officer and how females ‘fit’’. She outlined the key themes from her research exploring what makes an effective firearms and tactical officer. The aim of the research is to better understand the values and behaviour of employees and the impact this has on gender representation and inclusion.
The next presentation, ‘Papercuts & Crossroads: How does trauma shape identity and engagement with extremism?’ was given by Deepti Ramaswamy. This was a presentation where Deepti shared some early observations from data from her former extremist participants and engaged in thinking aloud about what we can learn about how early experiences influence identity and engagement with extremism.
Finally, Simon Pavitt presented on how to ‘Influence secure behaviour with a threat avatar’. As Simon explained, secure behaviour relies on a usable mental construction of a threat to motivate action, but in cyber-security this threat is intangible, often informed by outlier cases in the news and unhelpful Hollywood versions of “hackers”. The result is the perception of an omnipotent enemy and this can feed a sense of fatalism among those who are in a position of making secure decisions. Threat Avatar is a proposed means to build an alternative, more accurate model of the adversary. It is anchored to research in threat actor behaviour, narrative-learning, and perspective-taking. To date, it has been applied across the Defence and hospitality sectors to great success. This research seeks to understand the efficacy of this approach along with identifying the variables that make it successful.
The event ended with networking opportunities for the PhD students and strand members and for discussion about the research projects informally.
Exciting events like this are happening in the future, keep an eye on the blogs and the event pages at the OPRC.
OU Psychology & Counselling 