School of Psychology and Counselling students

Vicarious trauma and vicarious posttraumatic growth in social workers from diverse cultural backgrounds in Australia

The research aims to explore the lived experience of vicarious trauma and vicarious posttraumatic growth in social workers from multiple cultural backgrounds in Australia. This study will employ a qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) design, with two data collection points (T1 & T2) over nine to twelve months. A qualitative methodology, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), will be used to explore and provide detailed examinations of how the research participants from diverse cultural backgrounds make sense of their personal lived experiences of vicarious trauma and vicarious posttraumatic growth. The findings of this research can be used to inform programs and policies to support the wellbeing of multicultural social workers.

Principal supervisor:  Professor Jane Shakespeare-Finch

Associate supervisor:  Dr Michelle Newcomb

External supervisor:  Adjunct Professor Renata Meuter

Developing and validating a night-time driving hazard perception test: application of data-driven principles

Driving at night is challenging. At night-time, visibility is reduced, light-levels are low and glare from oncoming headlights causes discomfort. Older adults find night-time driving particularly challenging and are more vulnerable to injury and mortality when involved in road incidents. Despite these challenges, there are no validated methods for measuring driving ability and safety at night. One approach that has been used for daytime driving is the Hazard Perception Test (HPT), where performance is measured by the speed that drivers respond to hazards in videos, using pre-determined hazard specifications. HPT performance has been shown to correlate with driving ability and safety. This approach may be promising for assessing night-time driving and could be enhanced using objective scoring methods that do not rely on pre-defined specifications.  The primary aim of this research is to develop a novel night-time HPT to assess drivers' hazard perception abilities at night. The night-time HPT will be validated against other known predictors of hazard perception ability such as motion perception tests. A secondary aim is to investigate whether machine learning (ML) algorithms can be applied to objectively score the night-time HPT. This area of research will make a key contribution to understanding night-time driving safety, by providing a tool that can be used to provide an index of night-time driving ability and hence identify safe and unsafe drivers.

Principal supervisor:  Professor Joanne Wood

Associate supervisors:  Associate Professor Philippe Lacherez and Associate Professor Alex Black

External supervisor:  Alison McKendrick (University of Melbourne, Optometry and Vision Sciences)

Fear conditioning: The role of stimulus valence in return of fear

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental disorder. Exposure therapy is well-supported as an effective treatment, however, return of fear is common. Fear is acquired through Pavlovian classical conditioning and exposure therapy is based on the understanding of an inhibitory learning model. According to this model the initial learned conditioned stimulus (CS)/ unconditional stimulus (US) association is maintained in extinction, while a second inhibitory association is developed. This research aims to investigate the effect of post-extinction CS valence on return of fear. Therefore, it will further the understanding of the relationship between evaluative and fear conditioning.

Principal supervisor:  Professor Ottmar Lipp

Associate supervisor:  Dr Luke Ney

Functional imagery training to build motivation for self-guided therapy for young people

Self-guided digital health interventions (DHIs) have the potential to deliver meaningful improvements for young Australians who often face higher rates of mental illness and barriers to traditional therapy compared with the general population. An individual's motivational state has been identified as a risk-factor in experimental studies and a common theme among participants who fail to engage with DHIs. Functional imagery training (FIT) is a promising new intervention that combines the client-centred counselling of motivational interviewing (MI) with multisensory imagery training to support motivation. My research investigates the utility of self-guided FIT as a motivational intervention for increasing young people's adherence to DHIs.

Principal supervisor:  Associate Professor Melanie White

Associate supervisor:  Dr Jennifer Connolly

Augmenting the prognostic utility of current methods of predicting persistent post-concussion symptoms (PPCS): Social cognitive and interoceptive impairments as possible predictors of PPCS

Persistent post-concussion symptoms are commonly encountered in clinical practice among patients following a mild-traumatic brain injury. Currently there is no established way of predicting which individuals are most at risk of developing persistent post-concussion symptoms after sustaining a mild-traumatic brain injury. Impaired interoceptive awareness and social cognition in the early phase following a mild-traumatic brain injury have been under-explored as predictors of functional recovery following mild-traumatic brain injury. Consequently, this research project will specifically examine the relationship between recovery trajectories and i) interoceptive awareness impairments and ii) social cognitive impairments among individuals with a diagnosis of mild-traumatic brain injury.

Principal supervisor:  Professor Karen Sullivan

Associate supervisor:  Dr Sherrie-Anne Kaye

External supervisor:  Associate Professor Liisa Laakso (Mater Research)

Cognitive and neural mechanisms for perceiving and misperceiving speech

Listeners can use prior knowledge to predict the content of noisy speech signals, enhancing perception. However, this process can also elicit misperceptions. This thesis aims to investigate how perception and misperception of degraded speech occur during the pop-out phenomenon, whether misperceptions during pop-out can also occur at the sentence level with highly spectrotemporally degraded speech, and whether particular cortical regions are involved in correct perceiving and misperceiving of degraded speech. A better understanding of language processing and its organization might aid in the improvement of neurorehabilitation therapies for people with hearing difficulties and aphasia.

Principal supervisor:  Professor Greig de Zubicaray

Associate supervisor:  Professor Katie McMahon

External supervisor:  Dr Sonia Brownsett (The University of Queensland, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences)

Exclusionary school discipline and justice system involvement: Identifying opportunities to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline

This project uses linked administrative records from education, justice, health, and community services to characterise the use of exclusionary school discipline practices within a large NSW population cohort, and to examine the relationship of disciplinary exclusion with different forms of justice system involvement. The project expects to deliver new information to inform policy makers, educators, criminologists, and psychologists regarding opportunities to avert the adverse outcomes of exclusionary discipline practices in Australian schools.

Principal supervisor:  Professor Kristin Laurens

Associate supervisor:  Professor Linda Graham

External supervisor:  Professor Melissa Green (University of NSW)

External supervisor:  Professor Kimberlie Dean (University of NSW)

Exploring different paradigms to strengthen extinction in human differential fear learning

Human differential fear conditioning is utilized to model and understand the mechanisms involved in exposure-based treatments for fear and anxiety disorders. During acquisition, participants are presented with two conditional stimuli (CSs), one (CS+) paired with an aversive unconditional stimulus (US) and a second (CS-) presented alone. Extinction, the repeated presentation of the CSs without the US, is the standard paradigm to reduce conditional responding that has been acquired following the repeated pairing of CS and US in acquisition. However, this reduction of conditional responding is prone to relapse. Gradual extinction, the fading out of CS-US pairings during extinction, has been shown to reduce the return of fear in rodents, but evidence from human research is mixed. The current study will investigate the effect the gradual extinction procedure in human fear conditioning, assess whether it reduces the return of fear, and what factors would contribute to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness in reducing the return of fear.

Principal supervisor:  Professor Ottmar Lipp

Associate supervisor:  Dr Luke Ney

Emotion processing: Examining internal contextual influences on human facial expression recognition

Facial expressions play a vital role in interpersonal relationships and social interactions by conveying information on specific emotions. Emotional contexts across human facial expression recognition studies have considered an array of internal and external contextual variables. Typically, facial expressions are recognised faster and more accurately when contextual information is congruent with the emotion depicted in the expression in line with the perceiver's individual affective state (or mood). This research proposes to establish a mood induction procedure to investigate the influence of affective states on emotion perception. The project aims to address some of the inconsistencies presented in the literature and determine the mechanisms that mediate the influence of contextual information on facial expression recognition.

Principal supervisor:  Professor Ottmar Lipp

Associate supervisor:  Dr Stephanie Tobin

External supervisor:  Belinda Craig (Bond University (Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine)