Dublin City University is home to researchers working in a wide range of different areas in the field of psychology, and different applications of this discipline. “Understanding how people think, act, react and interact is vital to enabling people and organisations to flourish” states the DCU School of Psychology in its own words. “From living well to illness and disability, to the intersection of technology and wellbeing, and spanning across the social-cognitive and behavioural science of wellbeing” the school’s research is ambitious in its breadth.  The DCU Business School is home to the Work, Psychology, and Strategy academic group, and the trustLAB, one of the largest research groups on trust in Europe.  Elsewhere, the DCU Centre for Possibility Studies brings together the University’s cutting edge research in psychology, education and technology.

Gender and Gaelic Games

DCU School of Psychology's Dr Simon Dunne, Prof. Pamela Gallagher, Laura Dempsey and Maynooth’s Dr Siobhán Woods’ research identifies a huge gap in Gaelic games.  In a mixed-methods study drawing on surveys from 369 players across all 32 counties and in-depth interviews with 14 athletes, their data produced ratios that are stark.  Women were 27.6% more  likely to report gender impacts on their playing experience in GAA, while 84% of male athletes reported that gender had no impact on their own experiences in the game.

The study's most actionable finding may be its fourth theme:  shared values.  Men and women athletes described the same core commitments to their club, to their teammates, and to the game itself.  The authors argue these commonalities are not incidental but strategic, offering a basis on which to build genuine male allyship as the GAA, LGFA, and Camogie Association navigate their historic move towards a single, integrated governing body.  Equality, this research suggests, is not a women's issue waiting to be discovered by men but a sporting issue that requires everyone’s input.

‘Possibilities Literacy’ and the future of education

Prof. Vlad Glăveanu of DCU's Business School and Centre for Possibility Studies, together with colleagues at Maynooth University and Rider University, has produced a paper seeking to redefine what it means to be prepared for the future. ‘Possibilities Literacy’ begins from a deceptively simple premise: in a world defined by uncertainty, the most critical human capacity is not knowledge, but the ability to engage creatively, ethically, and collaboratively with what does not yet exist.

The authors are explicit that this is not a sequential model but an ecology.  It is a living system of capacities that develop together, reinforce one another, and respond to context.  The team put this new ecology into practice in a series of "Possibility Making Workshops" delivered in a north Dublin primary school, in which children moved from passing a party hat around a circle while imagining new uses for it to collaboratively constructing fabric lights, embroidered notebooks, and a mosaic mural.  Each activity was deliberately designed to develop a specific cluster of the framework's competencies.

Daily struggles and their impact on trust in working relationships

There has been a significant amount of Organisational Psychology and specifically Trust research examining how trust is built and how it is repaired after being broken.  However, less time has been spent looking at how it is tested in situations of misalignment, differing expectations and unexpected pressure which might bend but not break trust in a working relationship.

The relational threats their participants described ranged widely:  organisational mergers, disputed bonus allocations, performance complaints, the dislocating effects of the pandemic, promotion-related role changes.  What the analysis uncovered is a three-stage process:  an assessment phase in which both parties make sense of the threat individually; an active maintenance phase in which they work together, with what the authors call "mutual agency," through strategies including creating a shared mental model, cognitive and structural reassurance, and dyadic problem-solving; and an outcome phase whose result is shaped by which path the dyad followed.  Critically, the study finds that how a threat is experienced emotionally can be as decisive as what actually happened.  A manager who makes an error that leaves their employee feeling upset (an approach emotion) is more likely to face an immediate, joint resolution than one whose error produces frustration or anger, which triggers temporary withdrawal before engagement becomes possible.  Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding is that many dyads reported their trusting relationship as stronger after navigating a threat than before. It is a finding that has direct implications for how organisations design leadership development and conflict management training.

The neurological processes of decision making

Dr David McGovern (School of Psychology) and a collaborative team spanning DCU, Trinity College Dublin, and University College Dublin has identified something that decision neuroscience has long been seeking: a brain signal that tracks urgency independently of any specific movement plan.  The signal is the Contingent Negative Variation (CNV), a well-studied frontocentral component of the human electroencephalogram. What was not previously understood was quite how much it was doing in these processes.

This study changes this picture across three complementary experiments.  Using EEG recordings across contrast discrimination and motion detection tasks, the team demonstrated that the CNV builds over time at a rate entirely unaffected by how strong the sensory evidence.  This is in contrasts to the well-established central parietal positivity (CPP), which tracks evidence accumulation directly.  More revealing still was a delayed-response experiment in which participants were asked to make their decision but withhold their physical response until a cue appeared.  The CNV peaked and returned to baseline at the moment of internal decision commitment, aligned with the CPP, rather than continuing to build towards response execution as motor preparation signals do.  The CNV, in other words, is tracking the cognitive act of deciding, not the physical act of responding.  It offers a non-invasive, model-independent tool for detecting dynamic urgency adjustments in populations where behavioural data alone may be insufficient, including clinical groups in whom decision-making is atypical.

These four studies, comprising different methods from four different areas of psychology and which bridge adjacent fields, show that research at DCU is diverse and highly collaborative.  Whether it is playing sports in contexts that seem like they were built for others, imagining excelling in fields or industries that do not yet exist, maintaining relationships while the organisational pressures encroach, or trying to understand the very process of making decisions, DCU researchers are at the forefront of understanding.