- Supervisors: Prof Isabelle Mareschal & Dr Jessica Agnew-Blais
- Funding: QMUL Principal's Studentship
- Deadline: 14th April 2023
The following fully-funded PhD studentship is available in the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences with an expected start date of Sept 2023.
Research environment
The School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences at Queen Mary is one of the UK’s elite research centres, according to the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF). We offer a multi-disciplinary research environment and have approximately 150 PhD students working on projects in the biological and psychological sciences. Our students have access to a variety of research facilities supported by experienced staff, as well as a range of student support services.
The Visual Cogniton lab, led by Prof Mareschal, uses psychophyiscal methods to examine inter-disciplinary questions. Further information about her research can be found at http://isabelle-mareschal.squarespace.com/
Training and development
Our PhD students become part of Queen Mary’s Doctoral College which provides training and development opportunities, advice on funding, and financial support for research. Our students also have access to a Researcher Development Programme designed to help recognise and develop key skills and attributes needed to effectively manage research, and to prepare and plan for the next stages of their career.
The successful candidate will receive the training needed to carry out their research, including advanced psychophysical techniques and behavioural testing. They will learn to test participants, as well as to design and interpret experiments . You will also learm to prepare written reports for publication, will present at world leading conferences and will join in any outreach activities. You will join a vibrant and multi-disciplinary lab with other PhD students, postdocs and be embedded within the departemnt of Psychology.
Project description
Facial expressions convey critical information about our state of mind and compliment healthy social interactions. Failures to interpret emotional expressions are associated with many clinical conditions, including anxiety and depression. However, atypical processing may reflect perceptual differences (e.g. an angry face doesn’t look angry to that person) or response differences (e.g. an angry face looks angry, but the person responds as if it were not). The distinction is crucial because these different sources of atypical emotion processing require different therapeutic strategies. Understanding why some people fail to respond appropriately to emotional expressions requires new tools that are capable of uncovering what a particular expression looks like to an individual.
We recently developed new tools that allow people to create their own facial expressions (their “internal representations”) of different emotions (Binetti et al. (2022) PNAS). Using these tools, we found that there is a large amount of individual variability in how emotional faces are represented in healthy adults. This has profound implications for the interpretation of emotion recognition tasks used to define typical and atypical behaviour. In this project we will examine two aspects of emotional expression recogniton: how it develops and how conceptual knowledge (e.g. our individual understanding of the word "fear") influences its development.
We will focus on adolescence and young adults which is a period where young people start to construct their social identity and is also the period when mental health problems arise.
Funding
The studentship is funded by Queen Mary and will cover home tuition fees, and provide an annual tax-free maintenance allowance for 3 years at the UKRI rate (£19,668 in 2022/23).
For international students interested in applying, please note that this studentship only covers home tuition fees and students will need to cover the difference in fees between the home and overseas basic rate. Tuition fee rates for 2023-24 are to be confirmed. Details on current (2022-23) tuition fee rates can be found at: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/funding_phd/tuition-fees/
Eligibility and applying
Knowledge of statistics and programming languages (e.g Matlab and Psychtoolbox) is desirable, as is experience of testing adults or adolescents.
Applications are invited from candidates with, or expecting to be awarded, at least an upper-second class honours degree (or equivalent qualification) in an area relevant to the project (e.g. psychology, neuroscience, computer science or biology).
Candidates with a Masters degree are encouraged to apply.
Informal enquiries about the project can be sent to Prof Isabelle Mareschal ([Email Address Removed]). Formal applications must be submitted through our online form by the stated deadline.
The School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences is committed to promoting diversity in science; we have been awarded an Athena Swan Silver Award. We positively welcome applications from underrepresented groups.
http://hr.qmul.ac.uk/equality/
https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sbcs/about-us/athenaswan/
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