Psychslam

Collage of student attendees at Psych Slam 2023 — Psychslam

Welcome to PsychSlam!

Registration for 2025 is open. Celebrate our 10th anniversary with us!

Are you a TY student interested in psychology and science communication?

Would you like to learn more about how psychologists understand how people think, behave, and feel?

The PsychSlam competition organised by the School of Applied Psychology UCC gives TY student teams the opportunity to research a topic in Psychology and present their findings in a 6-minute PowerPoint presentation.

Participating teams gain experience in teamwork and science communication, and build connections with other students, researchers and psychologists.

All teams will receive detailed guidance and support, including an in-person training session on how to prepare their talk, the topics, and resources they can use to put their talk together.

Every year, students tell us that they have a wonderful experience learning about psychology and research, as well as how to present information to audiences in an informative and engaging manner (read more in the Student Teams Feedback).

The PsychSlam 2025 training day will be on Wednesday 9^th April and the competition day will be on Friday 16^th May

Our Team

The event is led by Dr Samantha Dockray, Dr Gillian Murphy, Dr Clodagh Butler and Dr Marica Cassarino.

Samantha Dockray

Samantha is a psychobiologist, interested in the interactions between physiological and psychological processes that occur during childhood and adolescence, in relation to stress. Her work uses wearable technologies and digital interventions, laboratory research as well as measures of people’s behaviour, mood and experiences in their everyday lives. The research and community projects Samantha participates in are described at beats-lab.com, including the Teen Advisory Group, who guide the research in thinking about issues important to teens themselves.

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Gillian Murphy

Gillian is a Cognitive Psychologist interested in understanding attention and memory in everyday scenarios. She has conducted research examining distraction and attention failure in simulated driving environments and eyewitness memory for crimes. Much of her recent research relates to misinformation - assessing who is most susceptible to misinformation, how and when do false memories form in response to misinformation, and developing interventions to reduce harm.

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Clodagh Butler

Clodagh is a work and organisational psychologist. She is interested in the individual experience of people at work, in particular how employees react and respond to stress, how they cope with demands and challenges at work, and the influence that work has on overall employee well-being. In particular, she is interested in high performance, high-stress environments like sport, healthcare and business. She has conducted research on factors that promote individual resilience, the causes, responses and impact of burnout at work, and the stigma of mental health in the workplace.
Committee member of the Division of Work and Organisational Psychology (DWOP)

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Marica Cassarino

Marica is an Environmental Psychologist who does research on how the built and natural spaces in our community influence our wellbeing, and also on the psychological factors that lead people to behave sustainably. Marica is a Lecturer at the School of Applied Psychology and she is passionate about teaching quantitative research methods, that is, using numbers to investigate of how people think, feel, and behave.

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The PsychSlam Team are members of several research networks and groups, as well as a range of science communication activities including:

European Association for Research on Adolescence
International Society for Psychoneuroendocrinology
European Health Psychology Society
Society for Research on Adolescence
WellTeen Network Ireland & United Kingdom
beats-lab.com
Teen Advisory Group
Interdisciplinary Child Wellbeing Network
Aspire with Abbott
Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software
FameLab Ireland
UCC Environmental Research Institute
International Association of Applied Psychology
Psychological Society of Ireland Special Interest Group for Addressing Climate and Environmental Emergency
Children’s Research Network
Irish Sexualities and Gender Research Network
Psychological Society of Ireland, Division of Work and Organisational Psychology

Psychslam Interns and Volunteers

Every year, student interns and volunteers from the School of Applied Psychology play a crucial role in welcoming and supporting the TY teams during training and the PsychSlam final.

TY students will have a chance to meet our students and learn more about studying Psychology in our BA courses in Applied Psychology and Psychology and Computing in UCC.