Dr Paula Booth

Paula completed her BSc in Psychology at the University of East London, then spent time at UEL as Research Assistant in the School of Health and Biosciences before successfully passing her PhD viva at UEL in 2015. Paula’s PhD research investigated the effects of water consumption and dehydration on cognitive performance and mood in schoolchildren.

Paula worked as a Research Fellow at the London South Bank University before returning to UEL in February 2017 as a lecturer.

Her research interests are focused on the effects of health behaviours such as water consumption and diet on cognitive performance. Additionally, Paula has an interest in how attitudes influence food and drink consumption.

My main area of interest is looking at the effects of dehydration and water consumption on cognitive performance and fine motor skills in children (Booth, Taylor & Edmonds, 2012). I would like to start expanding this research by looking at the effects of other beverages, such as milk, and nutritional substances on cognitive performance and fine motor skills.
Additionally, I am interested in research which looks at implicit and explicit attitudes.  Often results are different when explicit measures of attitude are gathered using questionnaires and surveys when compared to implicit measures of attitude which are more automatic and less consciously controlled. For example, people are less likely to express positive attitudes towards cigarettes in a questionnaire but results from an Implicit Attitude Task may reveal that they associate cigarettes with positive images or words (Booth, Albery & Frings, 2017). I would be interested in expanding this research to investigate attitudes towards nutritional substances such as sugar.

Module Leader for PY6309 Applied Child Psychology

I also teach Individual Differences at Level 4 and 5.