Staff

Dr Laura Simonds CPsychol - Research Interests

Intrusive Cognitive Phenomena

My primary interest area is the experience of intrusive thoughts, images and impulses. I am interested in the occurrence of so-called 'normal' intrusions and how they become clinical obsessions as seen in conditions such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). This involves the assessment of obsessions and related phenomena (e.g. compulsions, responsibility appraisals, thought-action fusion, danger expectancies) in both clinical and non-clinical groups. My research work has focused on cognitive models of the development and maintenance of clinical obsessional states. Recently, I have also become interested in exploring the role of disgust in contamination-related obsessions and compulsions and the role of magical thinking in the development of obsessions in children and adolescents. I have also conducted several studies assessing the psychometric properties of questionnaire measures of obsessive-compulsive features.

Attitudes to OCD/mental illness

A second interest area is attitudes to mental health problems, and OCD specifically. I have looked at people's attitudes to different types of obsessive-compulsive problem using a quasi-experimental study utilizing vignettes. I have also conducted interviews with people who have been diagnosed with OCD to gain their views about the process of divulging the content of obsessional problems and their attitudes and experiences of seeking help from formal and informal sources. I have written a review paper that addressed the particular phenomenology of OCD and its impact on help-seeking, mapping this onto primary care filter models of access to mental health services.

Anxiety and depression in pregnancy and the post-partum period

During the course of investigating help-seeking for obsessional problems, I looked at the experience of negative, unpleasant intrusive thoughts in women who were pregnant. This type of study necessitates engagement with complex ethical and methodological issues. Quite recently, I have become involved in research looking at post-natal depression in South Asian women and in new fathers.

Publications

Lewis, A., Maras, P. & Simonds, L.M. (2000). Young school children working together: A measure of individualism/collectivism. Child: Care, Health and Development, 26(3), 229-238.

Maras, P., Lewis, A. & Simonds, L.M. (1999). Young children co-operating to co-operate and co-operating to compete in two primary schools. Educational Psychology, 19(3), 245-258.

Simonds, L.M. & Elliott, S.A. (2001). OCD patients and nonpatient groups reporting obsessions and compulsions: Phenomenology, help-seeking, and access to treatment. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 74, 431-449.

Simonds, L.M., Elliott, S.A. & Thorpe, S.J. (In Preparation). Obsessions and compulsions in pregnant women.

Simonds, L.M. & Thorpe, S.J. (2003). Attitudes towards obsessive-compulsive disorders: an experimental investigation. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 38, 331-336.

Simonds, L.M., Thorpe, S.J. & Elliott, S.A. (2000). The Obsessive Compulsive Inventory: Psychometric properties in a nonclinical student sample. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 28(2), 153-159.

Thorpe, S.J., Patel, S.P. & Simonds, L.M. (2003). The relationship between disgust sensitivity, anxiety and obsessions. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 41, 1397-1409.