I presently have a contract with Sage Publications to write a book entitled ‘The Social Psychology of Emotion’. The book includes three major sections: the history and philosophies of emotion; discipline specific views of emotion (such as, biological, psychological, social, psychoanalytic and post-structuralist); and contemporary psychosocial research involving emotion. I have been working with Dr Dave Harper and Dr Ian Tucker (both in UEL’s School of Psychology) on a project concerned with everyday experiences of living in a surveillance society. We were awarded a small grant to recruit research assistants who conducted semi-structured interviews with Londoners about their views of living in a so called ‘surveillance society’. A number of papers are presently in submission and a further grant application is being sought. My particular analytic interests here are concerns with (impersonal) trust and suspicion; and thinking about the surveillance society in terms of ‘affective atmospheres’. I have recently been doing some research on conspiracy theory website forums. I am interested in how individuals, who are usually marginalised because of their unusual beliefs, interact in online spaces. This has led to a project which looks at the rhetoric and discourse that adherents of conspiratorial beliefs utilise and the formation of online identities. I am also analysing the virtual environment of a prominent conspiracy theory website in relation to the forms of identity constructions that it influences.

I would be interested in supervising PhD projects or conducting collaborative research with researchers/students who propose to draw on psychosocial/critical social-psychology related theory to look at the following areas:

• Emotional Disclosure
• Surveillance Studies
• Conspiracy Theory
• Suspicion and Trust

Employment

• University of Nottingham Lecturing in counselling Jan 2006 - Aug 2007
• Loughborough University Lecturing in Psychology June 2006 - Jan 2007
• Coventry University Lecturing in Pschology Aug 2005 - May 2006

Education

• Baccalaureate in Philosophy (Second Class Honours Grade 1), Milltown Institute, Dublin.
• BA in Psychosocial Studies (First Class Honours), University of East London.
• Postgraduate Certificate in Psychotherapy, The University of Derby.
• Postgraduate Diploma in Psychotherapy, University of Birmingham.
• PhD in Psychology, Loughborough University.
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, University of East London.
• Chartered Psychologist, The British Psychological Society.

I am the module leader for the following modules:

• PS1201 Psychology in Context
• PS2203 Qualitative Research Methods
• PS3230 Exploring Emotion Psychosocially module leader

I am a seminar tutor for the following modules:

• PS1204: Knowledge Skills and Experience
• PS2205 Introduction to Counselling 1
• PS2207 Consumption and Consumer Behaviour
• PS3205 Introduction to Counselling II

PUBLICATIONS

• Ellis, D. & Cromby, J. (2012). Emotional inhibition: A discourse analysis of disclosure.Psychology and Health, (5), 27, 315-532.

• Evidence generated within the emotional disclosure paradigm (EDP) suggests that talking or writing about emotional experiences produces health benefits, but recent meta-analyses have questioned its efficacy. Studies within the EDP typically rely upon a unidimensional and relatively unsophisticated notion of emotional inhibition, and tend to use quantitative forms of content analysis to identify associations between percentages of word types and positive or negative health outcomes. In this article, we use a case study to show how a qualitative discourse analysis has the potential to identify more of the complexity linking the disclosure practices and styles that may be associated with emotional inhibition. This may illuminate the apparent lack of evidence for efficacy of the EDP by enabling more comprehensive theorisations of the variations within it.

• Tucker, I., Ellis, D., & Harper, D. (2012). Transformative Processes of Agency: Information Technologies and the Production of Digitally Mediated Selves. Culture and Society: Journal of Social Research, (3), 1, 9-24.

• New media technologies are becoming an increasingly prominent constituent of everyday living, with their proliferation presenting new challenges to key aspects of the self, namely agency and identity. The potential recalibration of these notions comes about through new forms of agency being produced when information technologies play an increasingly powerful role in our lives. In this context agency is not something that can be reified and easily measured, or understood as solely intentional human action. Instead, agency is understood as something that comes to be as practices of life making. We take up these ideas in relation to people’s experiences with information technologies. Through semi-structured interviews with members of the public from London and the South East of the UK, we analyse how information technologies potentially recalibrate people’s subjectivity through informational agency. Participants’ engagements with information technologies are more nuanced and complex than a ‘either good or bad’ distinction. This is is one of the analytic foci of the paper, as information technologies, even when viewed with suspicion or as creating concern, are often willfully utilised due to the perceived benefits they can bring. We focus on the potential technologisation of identity and subjectivity through arguing that new forms of digitally mediated selves are produced when daily lives come to be defined more by information than by the flesh and blood of our bodies. We conclude by drawing attention to challenges facing our experiences, and understandings of, subjectivity brought about by the relentless informationalisation of life.

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• Ellis, D. & Tucker, I. (2011). Virtuality and Ernst Bloch: Hope and Subjectivity. Journal of Subjectivity,(4), 434–450.
• Theories of affect have become an increasingly popular tool with which to conceptualise and analyse subjectivity. Of particular interest to us in this article are expositions that have sought to bring to the forefront of analysis notions of excess and virtuality on the grounds that they bear fruit in relation to a potential politics of change. Although contemporary notions of virtuality and excess are highly attractive, they also bring us to one of the more unsettling features of affect theory: How is it possible to suitably analyse the realms of virtuality and excess due to their non-representational qualities? To begin to address this problem, we explore process-oriented theories of virtuality in relation to the Marxist process theory of Ernst Bloch, and draw on the recent protest movements against cuts to Higher Education funding as an example of what we term ‘affective hope’, a concept indebted to Bloch's notion of educated hope.
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• Ellis, D. (2011). Islamophobia and Ontological Insecurity: The Impacts of Impersonal Trust upon Interpersonal Trust. Research and Practice in Social Sciences, 7, (1), 1-16.

• Distinctions and relationships between interpersonal trust and impersonal trust are popularly theorised as the difference between trust and confidence. In this sense we have trust in persons but have confidence in abstract systems such as the government. Hence, interpersonal trust is often portrayed as being more affect laden than impersonal trust. This paper argues against these positions by looking at the ways impersonal (dis)trust in the case of institutionalised Islamophobia in the British context, may lead to forms of interpersonal distrust and ontological insecurity through the affective embodiment of political suspicion.

• Ellis, D. (2010). Stop and search: Disproportionality, discretion and generalisations. Police Journal, 83, (3), 199-216.

• It has long been recognised that discretion is vital to good police work. However, in Britain (and many other countries), practices of discretion in the stop and search context have come under much scrutiny as it has widely been linked to racist practices, i.e. a disproportionate amount of Black and minority ethnic individuals are stopped and searched compared to White people. In a bid to counteract the discretionary practices that are seen to be linked to racist stops and searches, police officers are required (in stops and searches under section 1 of the PACE code A) to have 'reasonable grounds for suspicion'. This article evaluates what has been claimed as the tension between the required reasonable grounds for suspicion and the need to draw on generalisations (police discretion) for effective policing.

• Ellis, D. & Cromby, J. (2009). Inhibition and reappraisal with emotional disclosure. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 22: 3, 319-333.

• The emotional disclosure paradigm (EDP) associates better health with repeated disclosure of emotional experiences. However, disclosure does not bring health benefits for all, and neither does the EDP adequately specify embodied mechanisms or neural pathways whereby benefits might be produced. This paper addresses these issues by offering more sophisticated notions of emotional inhibition and cognitive reappraisal. It then outlines aspects of the somatic marker hypothesis which supports a more comprehensive conceptualization of the processes that may enable both the positive and negative health effects of disclosure.

• Ellis, D. (2006). Narrative, disclosure and psychophysiology: A mixed methods exploration of emotion. PhD thesis, Loughborough University.

• Ellis, D. & Cromby, J., (2004). It’s not always good to talk. The Psychologist, November 17, 19.

Professional Membership

Chartered Member of the British Psychological Society

Member of the Psychosocial Network