Prof Pete Harris

I am a social and health psychologist. My principal research interests lie in the cognitive, emotional and behavioural response to risk, especially health risks. Recent projects focus on using self-affirming (usually by getting people to reflect briefly on their core values or personal strengths) to encourage less defensive responding to risk information and the impact of this on subsequent behaviour (funded by the ESRC in the UK, the NSF in the USA, and the SSHRC in Canada).  Other current research projects include exploring how people search the Internet for risk information (funded by the ESRC), how people respond to online PEx (accounts of other people’s health experiences; funded by the NIHR) and research related to a long standing interest in optimistic bias (the tendency to believe that other people are more at risk of future negative events, such as disease or misfortune, than oneself; various funding sources). I also have an interest in how people respond to the threats posed by infectious diseases, such as seasonal and pandemic influenza, and how they cope with chronic illness, particularly epilepsy. 

I work on these projects collaboratively with colleagues in the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Tasmania, and with UK colleagues at various universities, including Sheffield, Northumbria, and Oxford.

Tuesday 2-3

Thursday 2-3

else by email appointment

Griffin, Dale W. and Harris, Peter R. (2011) Calibrating the response to health warnings: Limiting both overreaction and underreaction with self-affirmation. Psychological Science, 22 (5). pp. 572-578. ISSN 0956-7976

Klein, William M. P. and Harris, Peter R. (2009) Self-affirmation enhances attentional bias toward threatening components of a persuasive message. Psychological Science, 20 (12). pp. 1463-1467. ISSN 1467-9280

Epton, Tracy and Harris, Peter R (2008) Self-affirmation promotes health behavior change. Health Psychology, 27 (6). pp. 746-752. ISSN 0278-6133

Harris, Peter R, Griffin, Dale W and Murray, Sandra (2008) Testing the limits of optimistic bias: event and person moderators in a multilevel framework. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95 (5). pp. 1225-1237. ISSN 0022-3514