Psychology Research at Lancaster University

Research

We are in the top 20 Psychology departments in the UK for world-leading research publications.

Research Groups

  • Infancy and Early Development

    How do babies develop an understanding of the world around them? We look at how language is learned and how a child's brain begins to make sense of the world.

  • Language and Cognition

    Our expertise focuses on language at multiple levels from phonemes to literacy, and cognition from behavioural regulation to embodied cognition, and beyond.

  • Perception and Action

    How do we respond to different environments or stressful situations? We research how humans understand and process the world around us.

  • Social Processes

    How do we develop definitions of morality or trust, and how do they affect our emotions in social interaction or decision making?

Laboratories

  • Babylab

    Children are little scientists. Join us on our journey to further research at one of the UK's most prominent Babylabs.

  • Aberrant Experience, Awareness, & Emotion Laboratory

    Research in the laboratory focuses on disorders in consciousness and aberrant experiences. These can include hallucinations, perceptual distortions and delusions. These experiences are often associated with neurological disorders and psychopathology.

  • Neuroscience of Speech Laboratory

    Research in the laboratory focuses primarily on investigating the neural bases of speech communication. We are interested in studying how normal brains communicate, and also what goes wrong in the brains of people with speech and language impairments.

  • Embodied Cognition Laboratory

    We are interested in how people's linguistic, bodily and environmental experience shapes their mental representations and how this affects the way they process language and the world around them.

  • Emotion & Communication Laboratory

    We are interested in how people process emotionally salient stimuli, e.g., how accurately do we recognise emotions from facial expressions? Is this ability affected by perceptual cues such as pleasant vs. sour or bitter taste, or individual differences such as ethnicity?

  • Word and Category Learning Laboratory

    In our lab, we investigate how infants learn about objects and categories in their environment, and how early language contributes to and shapes this learning.