Calendar of events

Title: PPIE/Co-production in Research

Abstract: TBC

Host: Katy Stokes

The session will highlight, via Prosper Portal resources and practical examples, the scope of competencies that early career researchers have which make them suited to a wide range of careers.

The session will also showcase how Prosper can be used to support effective career development conversations between postdocs and their managers – and how the Prosper Portal offers advice on what career development support looks like for those managing early career researchers

This session will be interactive, and offer recommended actions to encourage participants to put into practice the learning outcomes from the session.

During this session, participants will:

• Recognise the breadth of skills and competencies researchers develop, how these are transferable and valued across a wide range of sectors – including beyond academia.
• Explore the concept of ‘squiggly’ careers by considering case studies of early career researchers who have found success in non-traditional pathways.
• Consider how they can develop their own definitions of career success and become aware of Prosper resources which can help them to explore career pathways tailored to their own needs.
• Learn how to hold effective career development conversations – as a postdoc, and as a manager.

Hosts: Dr Suzanne Aussems and Dr Chiara Gambi

Speaker: Dr Sam Cacace from the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading

Abstract

Psychologists and other social scientists often deal in abstract concepts, like emotions, moral judgement, depression, trauma, and stress. Self-report scales, biofeedback, participant observation, and other commonly used methods provide means to access these valuable parts of human experience, but can often be unreliable, exhibit poor validity, and/or fail to fully address the underlying construct. Fortunately, structural equation modelling (SEM) offers ways to evaluate relationships between constructs that are not directly observable (i.e., latent variables), through a two-step process.

In this interactive workshop, you will learn the foundations of SEM and the types of questions it can answer, including evaluating measurement models through confirmatory factor analysis, and structural models. We will work through SEM examples, ensuring model identification, power analysis and sample size checking, measurement reliability, and guidance on how to start thinking about and using latent variables in your own research. All coding will be tailored to R, but will be accessible to those who choose other statistical packages or are relatively new to the software, with additional resources provided to explore the techniques.

Time will be allocated at the end of the workshop for you attempt to code your own SEM and receive personalized assistance.

Preparation: This workshop will be run in R and Rstudio so please bring a laptop with these installed. You can also pre-install some of the packages that the workshop will be using, by running these two lines of code in R:

install.packages(c("haven", "dplyr", "lavaan", "semPower", "semTools", "semptools"))
devtools::install_github("melissagwolf/dynamic")

There will be a social lunch around 1pm, where we will go somewhere on campus to eat. The lunch will be covered, so please sign up here: Introduction to Structural Equation Modelling

Host: Dr Olga Feher

Title: TBC

Abstract: TBC

Host: Professor Adam Sanborn

Title: How would I feel tomorrow? Towards a mechanistic understanding of subjective pain experiences.

Abstract:  In this talk I suggest that tests of pain perception help validate theories of emotion. I will describe empirical support for predictive processing accounts of pain perception and how we used both group averages and individual difference approaches to examine this account. I will argue that our approach offers reliable, valid, objective quantification of the psychological drivers of pain at the level of the individual which may be useful in clinical pain settings.

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Host: Dr Suzanne Aussems

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Host: Dr Matthew Mak

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Host: Professor Nicole Tang

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