Module Directory

Students taking this module will gain an in-depth understanding of theoretically influential papers within a chosen specialised area of psychology.

Students will develop a critical awareness of advanced theoretical ideas in relation to a background of empirical knowledge, by producing two critical literature reviews based around two theoretically important papers selected from a list suggested by staff in the Psychology Department. Each review will be accompanied by a specialist tutorial, with the staff member proposing the target article. Students will complete two critical literature reviews with each composed of one written report and one oral presentation.

The aims of this module are:

• To provide students with an opportunity to examine specialised areas of psychology, by engaging with primary literature.


• To develop student skills in critically evaluating contemporary theoretical controversies.


• To develop student skills in the assembly and integration of information from a range of sources in the production of the two reviews.


• To build student skills in communicating ideas effectively in both written and spoken form, by requiring two oral presentations and two written reports.

By the end of this module, students will be expected to be able to:

1. Assemble and integrate evidence from a variety of sources, including primary sources, in order to build an original argument.


2. Critically evaluate complex empirical and theoretical arguments, within specialist areas of Psychology.


3. Communicate complex ideas effectively by producing written reports and spoken presentations, including the ability to provide an essential summary of a complex theoretical position.

Students will be exposed to detailed contemporary theoretical issues in specialist areas. Students are expected to engage in detail with primary source material and to analyse and interpret relevant quantitative information in the form of specific empirical outcomes.

Some tutorials will be given to prepare students for the coursework; however, this course has fewer contact hours than other courses, as it provides students with the opportunity to pursue an independent programme of study.

Sample list of articles subject to change:

• Anisfeld, M. (1996). Only tongue protrusion modeling is matched by neonates. Developmental Review, 16, 149–161.


• Bigman, Y. E., & Gray, K. (2018). People are averse to machines making moral decisions. Cognition, 181, 21-34.


• Bremner, A. J., Mareschal, D., Lloyd-Fox, S., & Spence, C. (2008). Spatial localization of touch in the first year of life: Early influence of a visual spatial code and the development of remapping across changes in limb position. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137, 149-162


• Brennen, T., David, D., Fluchaire, I., & Pellat, J. (1996). Naming Faces and Objects Without Comprehension - A Case Study. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 13, 93-110.


• Carlson, S. M., & Moses, L. J. (2001). Individual differences in inhibitory control and children’s theory of mind. Child Development, 72, 1032-1053.


• Clarke, A. D. F., Mahon, A., Irvine, A., & Hunt, A. R. (2017). People are unable to recognize or report on their own eye movements. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 70, 2251-2270.


• Demes, K.A., & Geeraert, N. (2015). The highs and lows of studying abroad: A longitudinal analysis of sojourner stress and adaptation in 50 countries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109, 316-337.


• Dewhurst, S. A., & Barry, C. (2006). Dissociating word frequency and age of acquisition: The Klein effect revived (and reversed). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32, 919-924.


• Evans, S., Price, C. J., Diedrichsen, J., Gutierrez-Sigut, E., & MacSweeney, M. (2019). Sign and speech share partially overlapping conceptual representations. Current Biology, 29, 3739-3747.


• Feeney, B. C., & Collins, N. L. (2015). A new look at social support: A theoretical perspective on thriving through relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 19, 113-147.


• Fiedler, K. (2014). From intrapsychic to ecological theories in social psychology: Outlines of a functional theory approach. European Journal of Social Psychology, 44, 657-670.


• Galesic, M., Olsson, H., & Rieskamp, J. (2012). Social Sampling Explains Apparent Biases in Judgments of Social Environments. Psychological Science, 23, 1515-1523.


• Gentsch, A., Sel, A., Marshall, A. C., & Schutz-Bosbach, S. (2019). Affective interoceptive inference: Evidence from heart-beat evoked brain potentials. Human Brain Mapping 40(1), 20-33.


• Hanel, P. H. P., Maio, G. R., & Manstead, A. S. R. (2019). A new way to look at the data: Similarities between groups of people are large and important. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 116(4), 541–562.


• Harris, J. L., Corner, A., & Hahn, U. (2009). Estimating the probability of negative events. Cognition, 110, 51-64.


• Healey, M. K., & Kahana, M. J. (2016). A Four-Component Model of Age-Related Memory Change. Psychological Review, 123, 23-69.


• Hertwig, R., & Grüne-Yanoff, T. (2017). Nudging and boosting: Steering or empowering good decisions. Perspectives on Psychological Science,12, 973-986.


• Hsieh, P-J., Colas, J. T., & Kanwisher, N. (2011). Pop-out without awareness: Unseen feature singletons capture attention only when top-down attention is available. Psychological Science, 22, 1220-1226.


• Hu, L., Zhao, C., Li, H, Valentini, E. (2013). Mismatch responses evoked by nociceptive stimuli. Psychophysiology, 50, 158-173.


• Hughes, G., Desantis, A., & Waszak, F. (2013). Mechanisms of intentional binding and sensory attenuation: the role of temporal prediction, temporal control, identity prediction, and motor prediction. Psychological Bulletin, 139, 133-151.


• Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330, 932-932.


• Klimesch, W. (2013). An algorithm for the EEG frequency architecture of consciousness and brain body coupling. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 766.


• Kotz, S.A. & Paulmann, S. (2011). Emotion, Language and the Brain. Language and Linguistics Compass, 5, 108 -125.


• Lambie, J.A. (2007). On the irrationality of emotion and the rationality of awareness. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 946-971.


• Lewkowicz, D. J., & Ghazanfar, A. A. (2009). The emergence of multisensory systems through perceptual narrowing. Trends in cognitive sciences, 13, 470-478.


• Li, B., Li, X., Stoet, G., Lages, M. (2019). Exploring individual differences in task switching. Acta Psychologica, 193, 80-95.


• Mahadevan, N., Gregg, A. P., Sedikides, C., & De-Waal Andrews, W. (2016). Winners, losers, insiders, and outsiders: Comparing hierometer and sociometer theories of self-regard. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 334.


• Morecraft, R. J., Stilwell-Morecraft, K. S., Ge, J., Cipolloni, P. B., & Pandya, D. N. (2015). Cytoarchitecture and Cortical Connections of the Anterior Insula and Adjacent Frontal Motor Fields in the Rhesus Monkey. Brain Reseach Bulletin, 119, 52-72.


• Murray, S. L., Lamarche, V. M., Gomillion, S., Seery, M. D., & Kondrak, C. (2017) In defense of commitment: The curative power of violated expectations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113, 697-729.


• Oostenbroek, J., Suddendorf, T., Nielsen, M., Redshaw, J., Kennedy-Costantini, S., Davis, J., Clark, S., & Slaughter, V. (2016). Comprehensive longitudinal study challenges the existence of neonatal imitation in humans. Current Biology, 26(10), 1334-1338.


• Pekrun, R., Murayama, K., Marsh, H. W., Goetz, T., & Frenzel, A. C. (2019). Happy fish in little ponds: Testing a reference group model of achievement and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117, 166-185.


• Quian Quiroga, R., Reddy, L., Kreiman, G., Koch, C., & Fried, I. (2005). Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain. Nature, 435, 1102-1107.


• Ritchie, T. D., Batteson, T. J., Bohn, A., Crawford, M. T., Ferguson, G. V., Schrauf, R. W., Vogl, R. J., & Walker, W. R. (2015). A pancultural perspective on the fading affect bias in autobiographical memory. Memory, 23, 278-290.


• Roberts, M. J., Newton, E. J., Lagattolla, F. D., Hughes, S., & Hasler, M. C. (2013). Objective versus subjective measures of Paris Metro map usability: Investigating traditional octolinear versus all-curves schematic maps. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 71, 363-386.


• Rolison, J. J., Hanoch, Y., Wood, S., & Pi-Ju, L. (2014). Risk taking differences across the adult lifespan: A question of age and domain. Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 69, 870-880.


• Stoll, J., Thrun, M., Nuthmann, A., & Einhäuser, W. (2015). Overt attention in natural scenes: objects dominate features. Vision Research, 107, 36-48.


• Teigen, K. H., Juanchich, M., & Riege, A. (2013). Improbable outcomes: Infrequent or extraordinary? Cognition, 127, 119-139.


• Turatto, M., Mazza, V., & Umiltà, C. (2005). Crossmodal object-based attention: auditory objects affect visual processing. Cognition, 96, B55-B64.


• Wallraven, C., Bülthoff, H. H., Waterkamp, S., van Dam, L., & Gaißert, N. (2014). The eyes grasp, the hands see: metric category knowledge transfers between vision and touch, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 21, 976–985.


• Ward, G., & Tan, L. (2019). Control processes in short-term storage: Retrieval strategies in immediate recall depend upon the number of words to be recalled. Memory & Cognition, 47(4), 658-682.


• Welsh, T. N., Elliot, D., Anson, J. G., Dhillon, V., Weeks, D. J., Lyons, J. L., & Chua, R. (2005). Does Joe influence Fred’s actions? Inhibition of return across different nervous systems. Neuroscience Letters, 385, 99-104.


• Williams, D., & Ahmed, J. (2009). The relationship between antisocial stereotypes and public CCTV systems: exploring fear of crime in the modern surveillance society. Psychology, Crime & Law, 15, 743-758.


• Wilson, D. S., & Wilson, E. O. (2007). Rethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiology. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 82, 327–348.


• Wood, W. and Neal, D.T., (2007). A new look at habits and the habit-goal


• interface. Psychological Review, 114, 843-863.


• Yamaguchi, M., Valji, A., & Wolohan, F. D. A. (2018). Top-down contributions to attention shifting and disengagement: A template model of visual attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147, 859-887.

This module will be delivered via:

• An introductory session on critical analysis.
• Two individual specialist tutorials with the staff member nominating the to be reviewed articles.
• Two student presentation sessions.