Honours Thesis Defenses Live Streaming Apr 23rd, 2024
Application Deadline for Honours 2024-2025 is May 1st, 2024!
Applications for the Psychology Honours Program will be reviewed by the Honours Committee and applicants will be notified in late May or early June whether they are accepted into the program so they can register for the Fall semester.
Thinking of graduate school or work involving research?
You’ll do better with an Honours degree!
Those interested in further study and graduate school or who prefer more extensive research experience may augment their knowledge and skills by taking a research–focused Honours Program in Psychology.
The Honours Program affords students an opportunity to develop and report on a research project under the direct supervision of a faculty member within the Psychology Department. Students taking the Honours program are required to complete two 6 credit honours courses, which can be completed within the credits required for your psychology degree.
In order to be admitted to the Honours Program, students are expected to achieve and maintain a cumulative GPA of 3.3 and to obtain a ‘B+’ grade in both PSYC 3300 and 3400.
How do I apply?
Please fill out the application form.
The application deadline for Fall 2024 is May 1st, 2024!
Psychology Honours Planning Guide
Admission to the Honours program is competitive. Please refer to the Psychology Honours Planning Guide to help you plan!
Thesis Advisors & Research interests
Before you can be admitted into the Honours Program, you will need to obtain endorsement from a faculty member who will serve as your thesis advisor. Ideally, your advisor should share a similar area of research with you. Below is a list of faculty willing to supervise, and their research interests. If you are interested in approaching a faculty member who is not on the list below, please contact the Department Assistant at psychology@kpu.ca, to inquire further.
- Azad, Tanjeem - denials of memory in forensic situations, gaslighting, false memory and beliefs, eyewitness testimony
- Bernstein, Daniel – lifespan cognition; social cognition; theory of mind; hindsight bias; false memory
- Bhatt, Gira – culture, ethnicity, identity; gender issues; youth violence, gang involvement; applied/community social psychology
- Champion, Amanda - Human sexuality, sexual assault, technology-facilitated sexual violence, misogynist terrorism, suicide, and mental illness
- Coburn, Patricia – eyewitness memory, perceived credibility of witnesses, child witnesses, legal decision making, confirmation bias, hindsight bias
- Dastur, Farhad – virtual or augmented reality, human factors, perception, evolutionary psychology
- Dukewich, Kristie - cognition, memory, multimedia design, teaching and learning
- Hosking, Jay - decision making, individual differences in cognition/motivation/behaviour, and the influence of drugs and stress on cognition/motivation/behaviour
- Jdanova, Liudmila (Lucy) - wellbeing in the workplace, work-life balance, leadership, person-environment fit, cross-cultural comparisons, positive psychology
- Le Grand, Richard- cognitive and perceptual processes with an emphasis on face processing
- Lymburner, Jocelyn – resiliency; mentoring; teaching and scholarship; mental health; emotional regulation; service learning; happiness and well being.
- MacLean, Carla – eyewitness memory and investigator decision making in forensic and industrial situations
- Matsuba, Kyle – environmental behavior; mindfulness; self and identity development
- Minosky, Shayna – test development and measurement; learning environment; group dynamics; positive psychology
- Orban, Levente – visual perception, comparative psychology and artificial neural networks
- Pedersen, Cory – Pedersen, Cory – Human Sexuality; anatomy, physiology, response, & relationships, sexual health, development, & education, sexual orientation, sexuality 'at the margins' (atypical interests, sex work, pornography); Psychology of Gender; norms, roles, & gender identities; Developmental Psychopathology
- Podrouzek, Wayne – cognitive; memory; perception; consciousness
- South, Cluny - psychology of human-animal interaction, intergroup behaviour (incl. prejudice and genocide), conservation psychology and applied social psychology
- Tarry, Hammond – social, moral, political, and personality psychology
- Thompson, Susan - eating disorders and sports psychology and animal behaviour
- Tweed, Roger – positive psychology; violence; cultural psychology; learning strategies
Q & A (from a previous honours student)
Q: What did you need to do to get into the Honours program?
A: I asked a faculty member to be my supervisor, filled out the application form, and wrote a very brief description of my proposed thesis.
Q: How long did it take to prepare everything, including the application, to get into the program?
A: I already had an idea about what I wanted to do for my thesis, so that didn’t take long. The application was very short.
Q: Any advice for students considering the Honours program?
A: If you don’t have a firm thesis topic when you apply, don’t worry. Talk it over with your potential supervisor. It helps a lot to meet with your supervisor before you start Honours so that you can begin to prepare with readings, etc.
Q: What is the Honours program like? How much work is it?
A: The Honours program really isn’t much more work than taking any other 6 credits of course work. What is a lot of work is preparing for the GRE, applying for NSERC or SSHRC, and preparing graduate school applications. If I knew then what I know now, I would have familiarized myself with what I would need for the GRE and the applications, and have gotten started with those in the summer, at the latest.
Q: Why did you do the Honours program?
A: I needed to know whether I really liked to do research. There’s no point in applying to grad school if you don’t like research. Also, I knew that completion of Honours was a requirement for most grad schools.
Q: Are you glad you did?
A: I am definitely glad that I did Honours. I learned a lot about doing my own research, beyond Psych 3400. It allowed me to apply to and be accepted into a PhD program.
Careers
Psychology graduates work in various roles such as: group home coordinator, behaviour analyst, residential youth counselor, loans officer, and customer relations representative, to list but a few examples. More specific careers in psychology (e.g., clinical or counselling psychology, experimental psychology) require further study at the graduate level and the Honours program is vital for admission to most Psychology graduate programs.