Psychology & Religion Research Group

Kirsten Barnes joined the Psychology and Religion Research Group in October 2006 as a Research Assistant working for Dr. Nicholas Gibson. Her interest in Psychology of Religion started during her undergraduate degree at Bristol University where, supervised by Dr. Christine Mohr, she conducted research investigating the effects of schizotypal thinking on brain laterality, repetition avoidance, and semantic processing in groups of Catholic, Jewish and New Age religious adherents.  In addition to her work at Cambridge University, Kirsten is also currently studying part-time for an MA in Psychology of Religion at Heythrop College, University of London.

Kirsten’s main interests lie in the field of Religious Cognition in which she currently conducts empirical work with Dr. Gibson. Recent and ongoing projects in which she is involved include: meta-analytic work on the God Representation; the exploration of attentional biases in religious cognition, and whether they are observable by testing the effects of a mortality salience prime on the processing of religion-related words; and the preparation of a large scale online questionnaire from which data will be collected to test hypotheses relating to God concepts, attachment, and fundamentalism.