Obituary: Dr Barbara Lloyd
Dr Barbara Lloyd, Emeritus Reader in Social Psychology, has died peacefully at the age of 79 after a short illness.
Dr Barbara Lloyd
Dr Lloyd was appointed at Sussex in 1967, one of the first to the newly established Social Psychology group.
She was then one of a comparatively small group of psychologists interested in cross-cultural research and she had worked on child development in East and West Africa. She was a founding member of the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology and was particularly interested in how cross-cultural research could illuminate environmental influences on cognition.
This interest resulted in her first book, Perception and Cognition: A cross-cultural perspective (1972), and in two later volumes that she co-edited, Cognition and Categorisation (with Eleanor Rosch, 1978) and Universals of Human Thought: Some African evidence (with John Gay, 1981).
However, her interests shifted in the early 1970s to gender socialisation at a time when women’s studies and gender issues were just beginning to become established.
She set up, with Dr John Archer from the School of Biological Sciences, the course ‘Biological and Interpersonal Bases of Sex Differences’. This was one of the best examples of the kind of interdisciplinary course that Sussex was set up to foster. Designed for students in their first term, it examined issues of sex and gender from the perspectives of biology, psychology, anthropology and sociology, with an engaging lecture series including, at one time, lectures from Professor John Maynard Smith. It was one of the most successful school courses and ran for more than 20 years.
The collaboration with John Archer produced two books: Exploring Sex Differences (1976) and the highly successful Sex and Gender (first published 1982, with a second edition 2002).
She also collaborated with Dr Gerard Duveen, who had been her research student, using social representations as a theoretical framework, publishing Gender Identities and Education (1992) and co-editing Social Representations and the Development of Knowledge (1990).
After taking early retirement in 1990 she continued to work, directing a large-scale study of adolescent smoking funded by the Department of Health. This yielded two volumes, co-authored with Kevin Lucas: Smoking in Adolescence: Images and identities (1998) and Health Promotion: Evidence and experience (2005).
Alongside her academic research, she worked as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, having trained with the British Association of Psychotherapy, and was active in their local association.
Professor Peter B. Smith and Dr Rod Bond