Psychology Doctor of Philosophy - PhD

The Department of Psychology is a dynamic and varied research community covering the cognitive and neural underpinnings of social interaction, learning, memory, and language, through to more applied research topics in forensic, health, and developmental psychology.

Our academic staff work at the forefront of their field, across psychological science and neuroscience, with an active, thriving postgraduate research community.

The Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway has been placed joint third in the country by The Times Higher Education following the publication of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 results.

In the REF 2021 results overall, 67% of Psychology's research was classified as 4* world leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour, highlighting the exceptional quality of the department’s research outputs, impact and environment.

The department received a top score for its research impact, with 100% judged to be 4* which is the highest standard of excellence. This outstanding result for research impact reinforces the importance and value of the department’s research to society and the economy.

We are located on a beautiful campus in Surrey, close to London and we have a wide range of research-dedicated facilities.

The department has earned a Silver Athena SWAN award for best practice in equal opportunities and our inclusive environment.

We invite candidates to discuss possible research topics with a potential supervisor before submitting a formal application. You can find out more about our staff and their areas of expertise here: https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/research-and-teaching/departments-and-schools/psychology/about-us/

From time to time, we make changes to our courses to improve the student and learning experience, and this is particularly the case as we continue to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. If we make a significant change to your chosen course, we’ll let you know as soon as we can.

Principal Investigators and their lab groups are supported by state-of-the-art facilities (fMRI, EEG, TMS, tDCS, VR, and eye-tracking as well as labs dedicated to sleep, vestibular-multisensory integration, psychophysiology, psycholinguistics, and infant cognition), and the department provides a supportive environment for the scientific training of doctoral students through one-on-one mentoring, regular training events, student-led seminars, and journal clubs.

Research in the department falls broadly into the following groupings:

Health and Well-Being
Language, Memory and Attention
Perception, Action and Decision Making
Social and Affective Processes
Each of the groupings have regularly held seminars where external researchers present the latest research and provide a rich opportunity for postgraduate research students to meet and discuss research with leaders in their fields. More information about the research groups is here: https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/en/organisations/department-of-psychology