This is a university wide, outreach initiative, with students recruited by the Widening Participation Unit.  Over 200 students joined a diverse range of programmes, from chemical engineering to health and medicine, to law and psychology.

The programme starts in February when students visit Queen’s for an induction day and an afternoon of teaching. They return to their secondary school studies while continuing their university studies online. They next spend a full day in April with us, getting feedback on their first online assignment. We meet them again, in June, for an induction to their summer school and the highlight of the programme is the July summer school week. They live in Elms student accommodation during the week and there is a full social calendar in the evenings.

Dr Chris Gibbons said about the programme:

“For their day-time programme in psychology, I wanted to make this an experience that reflected the academic life of our undergrad students. There were taster interactive teaching sessions on research methods, memory, personality and social psychology (on attraction – always popular!). The spotlight was put on the ways psychologists have carried out studies. We ran lots of mini experiments to illustrate these studies.

Each lunchtime was given over to sessions with different professional psychologists – in forensic, clinical, educational and health psychology. They outlined their journey to become this type of psychologist and what their work involved and how and why it was challenging and rewarding.

Students were given the opportunity to chat, in a relaxed and informal way, to our own UG and PG students (who were recruited as academic guides and a teaching assistant for the week) and to staff, about the experience of studying at university, about the discipline and about their different options that lay ahead."

Research Experience

The students conceived, designed and executed some really interesting studies. A couple explored different aspects of implicit personality theory. The first, involved asking participants to make intuitive judgments about the traits they associated with different faces. They were then asked to rate the faces again on attractiveness and they correlated the two results to test the ‘Halo effect’ (that attractive people are frequently assumed to have attractive personalities). The other group gave participants cameos of crimes, with the participants instructed to act as judges to impose sentences. The same crimes were associated with an attractive face, or an unattractive face or with no face depending on the version of the study you were in. Those with an unattractive face received sentences double those with attractive faces and, remember, the crimes were the same! Another group explored the association between personality and life satisfaction and birth order. There is evidence that first-borns or only children tend to have lifetime advantages deriving from a kind of VIP experience as the only one with their parents in childhood and, if they are the eldest, taking on a teacher role with younger siblings too. The research is mixed and so were their results with the first-borns in their sample more anxious but also more optimistic and the youngest higher in life satisfaction. 

One group explored context and memory. We often think we have poor memories when usually forgetting is about difficulties in accessing those memories and with the right retrieval cues we usually can remember. They tested this by having participants learn words in silence or while listening to music with lyrics or without lyrics. The music was the context or retrieval prompt.  If it is present when they recall it might help access the words. Students also often report studying while listening to music. However, if the music contains lyrics, it should interfere too – it should disrupt our attempts at encoding the new information. They found learning and recalling in silence worked best – an important takeaway for all students.

The final group had enjoyed the earlier session on attraction, and they wanted to see if we are attracted to people like ‘us’ – the ‘similarity effect’ is a powerful one in interpersonal attraction. They asked participants to select adjectives to describe themselves and then to select different adjectives to describe their ideal romantic partner. What they didn’t know was that the second list were synonyms of the first. They found a 70-80% similarity or overlap between self-description and ideal description!  The students only ran descriptive analyses and the dangers of this were flagged. 

On the Friday morning they finalized and did a dry run of their presentations and then presented to each other. The final session ran through what life would be like studying psychology at Queen’s, with more details on our programme, its #PsychologyAtWork theme and our USPs on placement, the opportunity to study at partner universities, the teaching and research excellence in the school and the diverse range of modules in the final year.

Student comments included:

“It was a very engaging…all the teachers were passionate about their subject which I found very inspiring”

“I valued being able to have professionals in to talk to us and it has helped me make a final decision on psychology” 

“It was very fun!  It was interesting to see how other people interpreted the theories and models that we were taught”

This is the third year running the programme. Last year six students joined us through this initiative. Of the 21 students enrolled this time, 17 have expressed a preference to study Psychology at Queen’s. 

If you are interested in learning more about this programme or studying Psychology at Queen’s please contact Dr Chris Gibbons at: c.gibbons@qub.ac.uk