Dr Ruth Lee

My first degree was in Russian Studies (University of Sheffield, 1995), and I worked in education, information, and research in the public sector for some time before becoming interested in psychology. I completed an MEd 'conversion course' in Psychology of Education at the University of Manchester in 2008, and received my PhD from the University of Toronto in 2018. I held postdoctoral posts at Queen's University Belfast and the University of York between 2018 and 2021, before returning to Queen's University Belfast as a Lecturer in Education at the School of Psychology in 2021. I joined York St John in 2022.

I teach on:

• PSY4016M Cognition and Development
• PSY4017M Psychology at Work
• PSY4018M Foundations of Research 2
• PSY5006M Investigating Cognition
• PSY5008M Psychology in Practice
• PSY6001 Research Paper (undergraduate dissertation)
• PSY7003M Child Development
• PSY7002M Research Paper (MSc dissertation)

I currently have several areas of interest:

1. I am interested in children’s and adults’ temporal cognition, and in particular in how much (dis)utility people assign to having memories of painful and pleasurable events, as distinct from living through them. This work has been conducted with Profs. Teresa McCormack at Queen's University Belfast and Prof. Christoph Hoerl at the University of Warwick, and with Dr Jack Shardlow at the University of Edinburgh.

2. With Dr Gabrielle Strouse at the University of South Dakota, I have started to develop work on creating and validating a measure of closeness between preschool children and the adults in their lives who are not their parents. We are currently focusing on grandparents; we hope this work will be useful in researching the ways in which bonds between grandchildren and their grandparents can be developed and supported via video chat.

3. In work with Prof. Patricia Ganea and Prof. Craig Chambers at the University of Toronto, I have also examined how conceptual, linguistic, and cognitive factors interact to shape the information that children and adults take from language in real time as sentences unfold.

Recent publications