Rate My Professor Richard Tunney

Professor Richard Tunney is Professor of Psychology and Head of the School of Psychology in the College of Health and Life Sciences at Aston University, a position he has held since 2018. He is an experimental cognitive psychologist whose research centers on judgment and decision-making. Recent foci include surrogate decision-making, behavioural addictions such as gambling and gaming disorders, and impulsivity. Other interests comprise implicit learning and categorization, episodic memory, second-language acquisition, and pro-social behaviour. His research portfolio features 65 journal articles, 6 letters, comments or opinions, and 4 review articles. Tunney teaches the Judgment and Decision-Making module (PY3023) and supervises PhD students including Jodie Raybould.

Tunney earned a BSc in Experimental Psychology from the University of Sussex (1993-1996) and a DPhil in Psychology from the University of York (1996-1999), with a thesis titled Artificial grammar learning and the transfer of sequential dependencies. His academic career prior to Aston encompasses postdoctoral research fellowships at University College London (1999-2001; Senior Research Fellow 2001-2002), Lecturer in Psychology at Keele University (2002-2004), Lecturer in Human Experimental Psychology at the University of Nottingham (2004-2006), and Associate Professor there (2006-2018).

Selected publications include the book A Primer of Judgment and Decision Making (Springer, 2024); Factor Analysis of Impulsivity in Gaming Disorder and Internet Gaming Disorder (BMC Psychiatry, 2024, with J. Raybould); Disordered gambling, or dependence and consequences: a bifactor exploratory structural equation model analysis of the problem gambling severity index (Addiction Research & Theory, 2024); Economic and social deprivation predicts impulsive choice in children (Scientific Reports, 2022); Surrogate decision-making (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2015); and The need for a behavioural analysis of behavioural addictions (Clinical Psychology Review, 2017). His scholarship has exceeded 5,000 citations per Google Scholar. He has presented public lectures, such as one exploring decisions made for others.