Monica Tamariz is an Associate Prof. in Psychology at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh. She has an MSc in Cognitive Science and a PhD in Linguistics (both from Edinburgh University) and worked at Edinburgh. She is an associate member of the Centre for Language Evolution and is involved in Carousel+, a great EU project on embodied remote dancing and partying.
https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/persons/monica-tamariz
Mioara Cristea is an Associate Prof. in Psychology at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh.
https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/persons/mioara-cristea
Dr Katharina Addington-Lefringhausen is a social and cross-cultural psychologist who is interested in intergroup relations and their consequences. Specifically, her work focusses on the new field of majority members’ globalization-based proximal acculturation towards ethnic minority members’ cultures in a shared society. As the Director of Community Development at SIETAR UK as well as leader of the SIG Migration group at SIETAR Europa, she leads a group of trainers on providing free intercultural training to volunteers who work with refugees and people who seek asylum in the UK.
https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/persons/katharina-lefringhausen
Dr Mhairi Bowe is the Past Chair of the British Psychological Society Social Psychology Section and an active researcher in the field of Social Psychology where she specialised in exploring the relationships between social connection, identity, inclusion/exclusion, loneliness, health, and wellbeing, as well as lived experciences embedded in communities such as volunteering and the provision of aid, marginalisation and experiences of stigma. Mhairi is a Chartered Psychologist and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Mhairi is the previous lead of the Groups, Identities, and Health Research Group at NTU Psychology and has recently taken up the post of Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology in the School of Social Sciences at Heriot-Watt University. Mhairi is currently a member of the Centre for Applied Behavioural Sciences at Heriot-Watt University. https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/persons/mhairi-bowe
Dr Marc Alexander is a qualitatively focused social psychologist. His research uses discursive psychology, underpinned by conversation analytic methods, to investigate interactions in day-to-day life. His analytic focus is on examining telephone helpline recordings in a variety of institutional settings, such as neighbourhood mediation, a housing and homelessness charity, and the police emergency service. He is also experienced in communication skills training with professionals using the Conversation Analytic Roleplay Method (CARM), in which practitioners work with recordings from their own workplace to establish what works ‘interactionally’ and what doesn’t, in calls to their service.
https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/persons/marc-alexander
Prof. Stephen Gibson is a social psychologist with interests in areas such as citizenship, obedience and representations of peace and conflict. His research draws on perspectives informed by discursive and rhetorical psychologies, which he has used over the past decade to develop a series of secondary qualitative analyses of audio recordings from Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, culminating in the book Arguing, Obeying & Defying (Cambridge, 2019). He is a former editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology (2020-2022) and has held several roles within the BPS Social Psychology Section.
https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/persons/stephen-gibson
Dr Melis Ceylan has a PhD in Marketing, and she is broadly interested in consumer behavior research. Her research uses social psychology to explain consumer behavior across different domains such as brand choice, information processing, and food consumption. Melis is experienced in conducting experimental research to understand the psychological processes behind consumer judgement and decisions. She aims to provide implications for marketers and policymakers to design products, messages, and policy interventions that will enhance consumers’ general well-being.
https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/persons/melis-ceylan
Dr Emily Messer is a primatologist and science communicator interested in social behaviour, learning, teaching, cultural evolution, conformity, and prosociality. Specifically, she is interested in exploring how different social and cultural contexts influence innovation, learning, and the transmission of information in primates. She works with children in diverse global populations, apes, and monkeys. As a result, her research crosses themes in cognitive, comparative, cross-cultural, developmental, and social psychology.
https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/persons/emily-j-e-messer
Alexander Hunt is a discursive social psychologist interested in political discourse, ideology, and rhetoric. For his doctoral research, he draws upon conventions of discursive and rhetorical psychology to explore how politicians align their positions with ideologies of democracy. Particularly, how politicians present their positions as self-evidently credible for upholding democracy which also undermines opposing stances for lacking democratic merit. By analysing these debates, he also aims to highlight how system justification is discursively practiced. Alexander is a committee member of the BPS’s social psychology section where he represents the Psychology Postgraduate Affairs Group (PsyPAG).
Sadvansha Munshi is a PhD candidate in social psychology with an interest in the use of qualitative research methods for Open Science. For her doctoral research, she is analysing interactional exchanges between the participants and the experimenter in a cognitive psychology experiment. Her research aims to open an alternative way of conducting radically open science by making the experiment itself available for analysis and inspection. It is anticipated that the findings from this research will be used to develop training resources aimed at helping researchers to learn about how experiments are conducted. Sadvansha is a committee member for BPS’s Social Psychology Section.
Sarah Stephen is a PhD candidate in sport psychology with an interest in the influence that social groups have on individual cognitions. Her research focuses on the social identity approach within sport contexts and aims to understand how social groups influence perceptions of self and relational efficacy.
David Colledge is a PhD student in social psychology interested in how cultural groups relate to one another in globalised, intercultural contexts. His doctoral research focuses on how majority-group members acculturate, and how different acculturation strategies relate to cultural appropriation and right-wing extremism.