Victoria Bourne

I am a teaching focused academic, and my teaching is primarily around the methods and statistics used in psychological research. I am passionate about engaging students in creating their own research projects, and I work with other academics from across the UK to help develop accessible and fun approaches to teaching.

In 2017 I published Starting Out in Methods and Statistics for Psychology: A Hands-on Guide to Doing Research, a textbook aimed at first year undergraduate students.

My pedagogic research focuses on the statistics anxiety that many psychology students experience, particularly considering the potential causal factors of anxiety and the interventions that may help to alleviate anxiety.

I am a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a National Teaching Fellow, an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a Chartered Psychologist. Additionally, I sit on the committee of their Division of Academics, Researchers and Teachers in Psychology and I belong to the Mathematical, Statistical and Computing Section.

My psychological research examines how we effectively process faces. When you look at a face, how do you decide whether that person is known to you and which emotion are they expressing? In particular, I am interested in how this information is processed in the brain and how the two hemispheres of the brain process facial information differently. Currently my research is focussed on understanding individual differences in lateralisation for the processing of emotional faces. I am particularly interested in understanding sex differences in the brain and the influence of hormonal exposure, personality traits and mood on the neuropsychological processing of emotion.

I completed my PhD at the University of Sussex and then spent some time in Scotland at the Universities of Aberdeen and Dundee before moving to the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway in 2011.