Teaching Staff

Core members of teaching staff for the MSc in Health Psychology are Dr Felicity Bishop, Associate Professor; Prof Christina Liossi, Professor of Paediatric Psychology; Dr Leanne Morrison, Lecturer; and Dr Heather Armstrong, Lecturer.  Other important members of the team that deliver specialist lectures and supervise dissertations include Prof Roger Ingham, Prof Cynthia Graham, Dr Daniel Schoth, Dr Sarah Kirby, and Dr Katherine Bradbury, and Dr Laura Dennison.

To find out more about members of the team and other members of the Centre for Clinical and Community Applications of Health Psychology (CCCAHP) please click through to our webpages listed on the CCCAHP webpage.  You might also like to follow us on Twitter to find out about our latest work:  CCCAHP Southampton (@CCCAHP_UoS).

Specialist lectures are also delivered by invited guest lecturers from other UK Universities and other departments and Faculties within the University of Southampton.  Beyond CCCAHP, Southampton has a wide community of health psychologists and psychologists working in health fields, with expertise that complements that of the CCCAHP team and includes public health and nutrition, primary care, and psycho-oncology.  We have particularly strong links with colleagues in the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit, the Department of Primary Care and Population Sciences in the Medical School and the Macmillan Survivorship Research Group in Health Sciences.  And each year members of this community may offer dissertation supervision to MSc Health Psychology students.

Here is a brief description of the core members of staff that provide teaching to the MSc Health Psychology:

Felicity Bishop is a Chartered Psychologist and Health Psychologist at the University of Southampton, where she is also Programme Director for the MSc in Health Psychology. She has an MA in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford (The Queen’s College) and an MSc in Health Psychology from the University of Southampton. In 2006 she obtained her PhD in Psychology from the University of Southampton. Following some postdoctoral work she moved to Primary Care and Population Sciences within the Faculty of Medicine to take up an Arthritis Research UK Career Development Fellowship. From 2008 to 2011 she undertook a programme of research, funded under the Fellowship, using mixed methods to investigate psychosocial aspects of acupuncture for low back pain. During this period she was also a visiting researcher at Harvard University, developing a programme of work around lay perspectives on placebo effects. In 2012 Felicity returned to Psychology at the University of Southampton to take up a Lectureship in Health Psychology. She also holds a visiting honorary fellowship at the Australian Research Centre in Complementary and Integrative Medicine, at UTS in Australia.  Felicity is pursuing an interdisciplinary programme of mixed methods research around contextual effects in health care, encompassing topics including: ethical, scientific and lay perspectives on use of placebos in clinical practice and research; uptake and adherence to treatments for back pain; applications and elaborations of the common-sense model of illness perception; utilisation of complementary and alternative medicines and psychosocial mediators of their effectiveness; mixing qualitative and quantitative methods.

Christina Liossi is a Chartered Psychologist and Health Psychologist. Christina is a paediatric psychologist and a Professor of Paediatric Psychology at the University of Southampton, and she is also Director of the Postgraduate Research Programme. She is an Honorary Consultant Paediatric Psychologist, at the Paediatric Chronic Pain Clinic, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust, London.  Before joining the Academic Unit of Psychology in Southampton, Christina worked as an academic at the University of Wales Swansea and the University of the West of England, Bristol; and as a clinician at the Department of Child Health, Singleton Hospital, Swansea, the Bristol Oncology Centre and the Children’s Hospital Aglaia Kyriakou in Athens, Greece. Her research on pain focuses on three intertwined themes a) the cognitive and affective neuroscience of pain, b) the development of theory driven psychological interventions for the management of acute and chronic pain in children and adults, c) the evaluation of the efficacy and effectiveness of psychological interventions in paediatric and adult pain management. Other research interests include psycho-oncology and neuropsychology. Christina has presented research and clinical workshops in Australia, France, Sweden, Greece and the USA and has written numerous papers, chapters, and a book on Procedure-related cancer pain in children (Radcliffe Medical Press, 2002).

Leanne Morrison is a Lecturer in Health Psychology within the Department of Psychology and the Department of Primary Care and Population Sciences, Faculty of Medicine. Leanne obtained her BSc in Psychology (2007), MSc in Health Psychology (2008), and PhD in Psychology (2012) from the University of Southampton. Prior to taking up her lectureship, Leanne was a postdoctoral Research Fellow examining the opportunities and challenges of using Smart mobile technology to support health-related behaviour change. As Deputy Director of the LifeGuide Research Programme at Southampton, Leanne’s research focuses on the development and evaluation of digital health behaviour change interventions targeting a range of health behaviours, including weight management, healthy dietary choices, nutrition, and stress management. She is particularly interested in understanding and measuring effective engagement with digital health interventions using a mixed method approach and in evaluating scalable models for supporting effective health interventions within a variety of health settings. Leanne is a chartered member of the British Psychological Society, has published numerous articles in both psychological and medical informatics journals on user engagement with Digital Health, and has presented her work at national and international conferences.

Dr Heather Armstrong is a Lecturer in Sexual Health at the University of Southampton.  Heather completed her PhD in Experimental Psychology at the University of Ottawa and has held postdoctoral positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention; the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia; and the Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia.  She is broadly interested in sexual health and well-being with a specific interest in sexual and gender minority health.  Heather’s current research topics include:  Sexual health for gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (Engage website and Momentum Study); Sexual fluidity; Mental health and substance use among bisexual men; Motivations for sex; Sexual function.