School of Psychology

 Tom Postmes is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. His research interests are group processes and communication, focusing in particular on the topics of social influence, the formation of group norms, collective action, intergroup conflict, perceptions of discrimination and oppression. In his research, he has studied online groups and social effects of Computer-Mediated Communication. His academic achievements received recognition through the award of a research fellowship awarded by the Economic and Social Research Council (2003-2006), and a fellowship award of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998-2002). From 2001 to 2003 he was associate editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology. He is honorary research fellow of the Amsterdam School of Communication Research.

 Renate Motschnig is an Associate Professor in the Department of Knowledge and Business Engineering at the University of Vienna, Austria.  Her research goals center around the discovery of principles and the development of techniques and tools to improve the development, effectiveness, and the quality of socio-technical systems. Her current research interests include conceptual modeling, knowledge and systems development, ontologies, process models, group and team processes, technology enhanced learning, motivation, cognitions and emotions in learning, the Person Centered Approach, communication and New Media. Since 2000, Renate Motschnig has focused on exploring the potentials of the Person-Centered Approach and Person-Centered Communication in interpersonal relationships, project management as well as knowledge development and learning. Since 2001, she has participated in several Person Centered workshops, both nationally and internationally. She has authored more than 90 international publications in refereed journals and conference proceedings. In 2001, she was awarded the Premio Leonardo da Vinci from the Rotary Club of Europe for interdisciplinary research in software engineering and humanistic and cognitive psychology.

Renata Bongiorno is in the final stages of completing her PhD (through The Australian National University). She moved to Murdoch in early 2007 to take up a position as a Research Associate in the School of Psychology.  Renata’s Phd research is primarily concerned with understanding how inequitable gender relations are reproduced in society. She is also interested in the psychology of social movements and social change. In seeking to understand how gender inequality is reproduced, her PhD research explored the pervasiveness of gender categorization and the need to develop a conceptualization of gender as a constant (i.e., ground) feature of social perception. She also explored how categorization in terms of gender can marginalise women relative to men, as they are afforded a much narrower scope of acceptable behaviour. Renata is currently working with Prof Craig McGarty on the ARC Discovery Project: Bolstering commitment to positive social change through group-based interaction.. This research is concerned with understanding how people come to act in line with a cause they are in favour of (such as reconciliation, poverty reduction and environmental sustainability).

Bonnie Barber is Professor and Chair of Psychology at Murdoch University. Her research interests include adolescent and young adult social relationships across life transitions, long-term benefits of organised sport and activity participation, and positive development in divorced families. She is currently directing the Relationships After Divorce or Separation (RAD) program.  The Spencer Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the National Science Foundation in the US funded her 20-year longitudinal study, in which she followed 1800 youth and their families from age 12 to age 32. Using results from her longitudinal research, she has designed and implemented an educational program for divorced mothers with adolescents in several states in the US, and in WA. A randomized controlled trial is underway of that program, funded by Healthway.  She has ARC funding to begin a longitudinal study of the importance of organized activities such as sport, performing art, and volunteer service for healthy development during the high school years. Her and her research team will examine the role of such activities in patterns of change over time in academic performance, risk behaviour and psychological adjustment. She is also participating in a collaborative research project on young adult financial behaviours based at the University of Arizona. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Research on Adolescence and a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Early Adolescence.