Psychology - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) at University of Waterloo

Psychology, Anthropology and Sociology (PAS) Building on Waterloo's South Campus, across from Laurel Creek. Dive into our PhD program and turn your curiosity in experimental psychology into groundbreaking research. Work side-by-side with expert faculty, creating research that matters.

Faculty: Faculty of Arts  |  Department: Psychology  |  Duration: 48 months  |  Study mode: full-time  |  Intake: Fall (September - December); application deadlines: December 1 (for admission in September)*; *Note: All relevant documents pertaining to your application must be uploaded by December 1. See the School of Psychology - Application procedures page for detailed information.  |  Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

What you will study

Research fields: Clinical: receive training in research and clinical practice for professional roles in clinical research, psychological assessment, clinical supervision, and more., Cognitive: investigate how the mind works and the mental processes that underlie how people acquire, store, transform, and communicate information., Cognitive Neuroscience: combine the areas of brain science and cognitive psychology to map higher-level cognitive functions and investigate brain architecture and neuronal processing., Developmental: study the systematic change across the lifespan and focus on cognitive, social-cognitive, and language development in infancy and early childhood., Industrial-Organizational: examine psychological processes in the workplace, including topics such as leadership, culture, performance, motivation, fairness, and ethics., Social: examine social movements, injustice, racism, and cultural divides to highlight how social context and individual differences shape human behaviour., Specialization options, Applied Data Science, Research project opportunities for this program, Exploring cognitive and neural factors involved in boredom, play, and curiosity, Boredom has been cast as a push to action - to find something more engaging. We recently theorized that this signal arises when our cognitive and neural resources are under (or over) utilized. In other words, a basic drive (in both humans and animals) is the drive to optimally deploy our cognitive and neural resources. Our lab is now in the process of designing tasks to test this novel hypothesis, one that we think extends beyond boredom., Cross-cultural decision sciences, Artificial Intelligence (AI) psychometrics, and natural language processing, We are looking for ambitious graduate students to conduct projects within the Wise Judgment Consortium, which brings together an international team of researchers to study how culture shapes the way we make decisions. Our work is highly interdisciplinary, combining psychology, natural language processing (including Large Language Models), computational modelling, and psychometrics to understand the complex ways cultural, ecological, and situational factors influence everyday decision-making., How Children and Adults Understand the Social World, We seek to uncover the principles, cues, and heuristics that guide how people think about the social world. Our research explores how children and adults understand other people's thoughts and emotions, as well as concepts like ownership, rights and responsibilities, and belonging. We also examine how people distinguish fantasy from reality and determine whether events are possible or impossible. Our recent work suggests that children and adults often make these judgments by inferring past events (historical reasoning) and by thinking about how things could have turned out differently (counterfactual reasoning).. Study option(s): Thesis.

Official programme page