Current research projects in the School of Social Sciences

Centre for Children and Youth research projects

'Realising Participatory Design with Children and Young People: A Case Study of Design and Refurbishment in Schools'

This research project is a collaboration between the Centre for Children and Youth and Coventry University's School of Art and Design. The project will gather a significant new evidence base regarding pupils' participation in the design and refurbishment of UK school buildings and classrooms.

Centre for the Study of Anomalous Psychological Processes research projects

'Testing the Psi-mediated Instrumental Response theory using an implicit task'

In order for parapsychologists to persuade interested academic peers of the reality of psi phenomena, they need to identify simple experimental protocols that have a good likelihood of success without extensive training or 'mystical' preparation. A particularly promising contender for this title is the protocol developed by Luke, Delanoy and Sherwood (2008). This project further tests and extends this protocol to see how it might help map the psychological conditions that affect the action of psi.

'Susceptibility to affect-based framing effects as a predictor of psychic experience'

Building on earlier models of extrasensory exception or psychic experience, this project proposes that the emotional system, particularly the system that encodes and retrieves feelings, may have been co-opted by evolution to work with memory systems to present anomalous information in a manner that would help humans to make more adaptive decisions in situations of inadequate sensory information.

'Intuition on the Trading Floor'

This project investigates the role of precognitive intuition in business decision making in a simulated currency trading situation and is part of a larger project that aims to develop tools to identify intuitively advantaged individuals.