We’re a friendly bunch and we want to help make a positive impact on people’s lives.
If you’re a policymaker or a practitioner in health or education, then please get in touch if you’d like to participate in our research or explore how we might help you find ways to incorporate self-affirmation into your working practices. And if you’re a researcher or research student, we’d love to discuss possible opportunities for collaboration.
You can either contact us at SARG@sussex.ac.uk, or get in touch with one of us directlty using our email addresses below.
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Professor Pete HarrisI'm a social and health psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Sussex, UK. I'm interested in how people respond to information that they may struggle to understand, believe or accept and how we can boost their understanding. For the past 15 years I've been investigating the implications of self-affirmation for promoting more open-minded appraisal of health-risk information and for health more generally, a topic on which I have published extensively. I am a founder-member of Sussex University’s Self Affirmation Research Group. |
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Donna JessopI'm a health psychologist at the University of Sussex and my interest in self-affirmation is in exploring whether it has the potential to reduce defensive processing and increase message acceptance in the face of personally relevant health-risk information. |
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Matthew EasterbrookI'm a social psychologist at the University of Sussex and am interested in how social identities can be barriers to learning and wellbeing. My research addresses questions such as: What social conditions give rise to achievement gaps between social groups, how do social identities contribute to these achievement gaps, and how can self-affirmation help reduce them? |
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Paul SparksI'm a social psychologist at the University of Sussex. My interests in self-affirmation theory relate to the notion of self-integrity, the role of threats to self-integrity, backfire effects, value salience effects, synergies with other theoretical frameworks, and the application of self-affirmation within environmental psychology. |
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Eleanor MilesI’m a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Sussex and my main research interest is the role of emotions in self-regulation. My interest in self-affirmation stems from its potential to help people self-regulate more effectively, and from how emotions might be involved in self-affirmation. |
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Ian HaddenI'm a doctoral student at the University of Sussex. I'm gathering evidence in schools about how social psychological interventions, including self-affirmation, can increase engagement with school, improve non-cognitive abilities and increase academic performance. |
External team members
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Sue ChurchillI'm a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Chichester. My research interests are in social psychology and health, with a particular interest in investigating the effectiveness of interventions to promote health-enhancing behaviour relating to eating and drinking.
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Philine HarrisI am interested in the cognitive and affective consequences of self-affirmation, especially in relation to health psychology. For example, I have studied the effects of self-affirmation on reactions to health risk messages on fruit and vegetable consumption, alcohol consumption and physical activity.
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Marlon NieuwenhuisI’m a social psychologist at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. My research interests are in understanding when and how social identities act as barriers in achievement and education choices (e.g., social class achievement gap, underrepresentation of women in STEM) and how self-affirmation can help to reduce those barriers. |
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Kerry FoxI'm a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Brighton. My research has a focus, firstly, on promoting informed health decisions using self-affirmation techniques to encourage behaviour change and, secondly, on reducing inequality in educational settings using self-affirmation interventions. |
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Sophie GoodwinI'm a doctoral student at the University of Chichester looking at the effects on young children of art-based self-affirmations on stereotype threat, academic performance and career choices. My research aims to develop a ‘child-friendly’ self-affirmation manipulation, and to discover if young children can create a natural buffer to stereotype threat by spontaneously self-affirming.
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