Psychology Research

A researcher conducting an experiment with a father and his baby.

A top 20 Psychology department in the UK for world-leading research publications.

Research Themes

  • Developmental Psychology

    How do we develop an understanding of the world around us? We look at cognitive, social, emotional and language development from before birth through to adolescence.

  • Cognitive Psychology

    What are the fundamental cognitive processes behind language, learning, memory, and attention? How does our understanding of cognition impact society?

  • Neuroscience and Neurocognition

    How does the brain respond to different environments and govern cognitive function? 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.

  • Emotion and 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.

Psychology news

Creating new understanding of how individual and population level security risks evolve, NABS+ is led by Lancaster University in collaboration with Bath, Cardiff and Edinburgh universities

£3.5M award for Lancaster to lead network to boost UK resilience and security

Lancaster University has been awarded £3.5 million to lead a Network Plus for Analytical Behavioural Science (NABS+) in Security and Defence. 
An experimenter playing with a toddler and the boxes

How do toddlers transfer information to others?

Academics within Lancaster’s Psychology Department have been examining how toddlers share information with other people, finding that younger children are less particular about the types of details they share.
Girl with pony tail and backpack at Brandenburg Gate

Educational school trips enhance adolescents’ curiosity, wonder and desire to learn

Researchers find that educational trips facilitate curiosity, wonder and enjoyment of learning in teenagers.
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The Data Science Institute - Apply for funding for interdisciplinary research workshops

The Data Science Institute supports interdisciplinary research across a wide range of disciplines and interests. We passionately engaged in a wide range of data-intensive activity, which is addressing critical societal, economic and environmental questions, new mathematical models and methods of digital innovation. We collaborate with a wide range of centres across the University and take a broad definition of ‘data’ and ‘science’ - reflecting an inclusive outlook.
A group of six children looking to camera with books open in front and trees behind

A new study of children aged 17 months to seven years has uncovered how language develops over the first years of life

A new study of children aged 17 months to seven years has brought some insight into the learning of young children
A person holding a tape measure in their hands.

A problem of gigantic (dis)proportions: why can’t we tell how wide we are?

Academics in the Psychology Department at Lancaster have been investigating people’s perception of their own limb width, and have found that there is little consistency in how we estimate our own bodily width amongst populations with no history of eating disorders.

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