Research Interest
The following research interests and specialisms are within the Department of Psychology at Maynooth University:
Dr Laura Coffey
The experience and psychosocial impacts of illness and disability. Self-regulation of normative (e.g., ageing) and non-normative (e.g., amputation, cancer) developmental challenges. Personal meanings and perspectives on assistive technology use. Self-management of long-term conditions. The development and evaluation of complex interventions.
Professor Seán Commins
The neurobiology of spatial navigation, learning and memory. Consolidation of long-term memories. Neural substrates of hippocampal-cortical interactions. Investigation of cognitive deficits following stroke and other disorders. The role of cognition in driver behaviour.
Professor Louise Connell
Cognition and cognitive science, especially the mental representation of concepts, sensorimotor grounding of cognition and role of language and linguistic distributional knowledge in cognition. Interdisciplinary research that spans psychology (experimental and cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics), linguistics (cognitive and corpus linguistics), and artificial intelligence (computational modelling, distributional semantics).
Professor Andrew Coogan
We are interested in circadian rhythms and sleep and their importance for health and wellbeing. Current research interests include assessing how circadian clocks may be involved in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, looking at circadian rhythm involvement in other important conditions, such as diabetes and depression, asking how the immune system influences circadian rhythms and assessing how cognition and behaviour may be changed following sepsis.
Dr Michael Cooke
Living and working with technology. Human factors and human-computer interaction. Understanding people living and working in complex systems (such as aviation, security, emergency management, health, manufacturing, energy production, critical infrastructures, or any system where people interact with technology), the psychology of lived experience (phenomenological perspectives), activity theory, and sociocultural psychology. I am also interested in Critical Psychology and qualitative methods.
Dr Michael Daly
Lifelong impact of childhood individual differences with a focus on self-control and mental health, psychological and health effects of major stressors (e.g. unemployment, poverty, weight discrimination, the COVID-19 pandemic), longitudinal data
Professor Deirdre Desmond
Psychosocial adjustment to illness, injury and disability, Outcomes measurement, rehabilitation, assistive technology.
Dr Unai Diaz-Orueta
Neuropsychological assessment using a process-based approach. Virtual and augmented reality applications in (neuro)psychological assessment and intervention. Cognitive rehabilitation procedures (both traditional and technology/game-based approaches). Serious games for health. Teleneuropsychology (both in terms of tele-assessment and tele-rehabilitation).
Dr Philip Hyland
Psychological responses to stressful and traumatic life events. General mental health issues including the structure of general psychopathology. Identification of risk and resilience factors associated with mental health responses to traumatic life events. Identification of the outcomes of exposure to traumatic life events.
Dr Dermot Lynott
My research falls broadly within the areas of cognitive science and embodied cognition. I am interested in how people's linguistic, bodily and environmental experience shapes their mental representations and how this affects the way they process the world around them. This research includes investigations of the grounded and situated nature of concepts, the ability of language, body and environment to shape representations and behaviour, and the interplay of linguistic and simulation systems in human cognition.
Professor Fiona Lyddy
Psychology of language and communication. Reading and writing. Computer- and electronic-mediated communication. Technology and privacy.
Dr Tadhg MacIntyre
Nature-based interventions, metacognition, embodied cognition and motor cognition, resilience and mental health, and digital nature and VR.
Professor Mac MacLachlan
Disability, impairment, ageing and chronic illness, service design, implementation and evaluation, social inclusion, assistive and connected technologies, human rights and global health, policy development and implementation, macropsychology, maritime psychology.
Dr Rebecca Maguire
Quality of life and well-being in patients with chronic illness, including cancer and multiple sclerosis. Caregiver well-being and burden of care. Health-related decision making. Coping with uncertainty. Psychological appraisals and representations of physical and mental health. Cognitive basis of expectation and surprise.
Professor Sinéad McGilloway
Broadly: The psychological aspects and community context of health care and social problems across the lifespan. Specifically: Child and adult mental health and well-being in the community. Health services research. Intervention/service design, development and evaluation. The health and social care needs of vulnerable and socially excluded groups. Mental health and well-being aspects of palliative/end-of-life care. Systematic reviews.
Dr Joanna McHugh Power
Later life social functioning, focusing on the experience of loneliness in later life, using both advanced statistical modelling and epidemiological techniques, and qualitative and mixed methods. The relationship between loneliness and social isolation and the impacts that these have on physical and mental health (particularly brain health and cognitive ageing). Interventions for reducing loneliness and social isolation and their evaluation.
Dr Joanne McVeigh
Global health; human rights, equity, and social inclusion, disability, including early childhood intervention for children with disabilities, policy development, implementation, evaluation and monitoring, systems thinking, macropsychology; organisational psychology, maritime psychology.
Dr Brenda O’Connell
Positive psychology, health, and wellbeing. Emphasis on if, how, and when positive psychological constructs (gratitude, resilience, optimism etc.) influence mental and physical health (somatic and biomarkers). Stress buffering effects of gratitude and compassion. Design, delivery and evaluation of wellbeing- promoting interventions.
Dr Katriona O’Sullivan
Widening access to education; digital skills development.
Dr Bryan Roche
The experimental analysis of complex human behaviour, language and cognition (EAB). Experimental social psychology and implicit attitude measurement. Fear and avoidance conditioning models of human anxiety. Intelligence and the development of behaviourally oriented educational interventions.
Dr Richard Roche
Memory in healthy and pathological ageing. Reminiscence Therapy. Dementia. Neurorehabilitation. Synaesthesia. Acquired and Traumatic Brain Injury.
For further details on the research specialisms within the Department please visit: https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/psychology/our-research
PSYCHOLOGY
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