About
Dr Katy Sivyer is a Lecturer in Clinical Psychology in the Centre for Innovation in Mental Health. She is also a member of the Centre for Clinical and Community Applications of Health Psychology at the University of Southampton.
She currently teaches on the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology as a member of the research team, co-leading the module on ‘Evidence-Based Practice’. She also supervises research projects on the undergraduate psychology programmes, the MSc Foundations in Clinical Psychology, and the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology.
Katy has previously worked as a Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at the University of Portsmouth and as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southampton and the University of Bristol, focusing on developing and evaluating behaviour change interventions.
She completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford, which examined how cognitive behaviour therapy and interpersonal psychotherapy for eating disorders work, and whether they work as hypothesised. Prior to this she worked in the NHS evaluating clinical outcomes of individuals with eating disorders following treatment in specialist services and worked in a range of other clinical settings including brain-injury, chronic pain, and mental health.
Research
Research interests
- Eating disorders
Current research
Katy’s research interests span clinical and health psychology. The majority of her research focuses on intervention development and evaluation. She is interested in understanding how treatments work, when, and for whom. This has included research understanding how hypothesised mechanisms of treatment and maintenance factors might relate to different psychological disorders and behaviours that might inform future work around intervention development. Katy is also interested in how different methodologies and analyses can be used to answer these questions. More recently she has become interested in understanding help-seeking attitudes and behaviours, and barriers and facilitators to help-seeking. Katy has a special interest in eating disorders, focusing on treatment, potential maintaining factors, and early identification and intervention.
Examples of current research she is involved in include:
- Attachment-based interventions in psychosis and acute care
- Understanding knowledge and attitudes and confidence to support help-seeking in eating disorders
- The role of cognitive fusion in eating disorders
- Barriers and facilitators to help-seeking for mental health problems in university students
- The role of cognitive fusion and other cognitive biases in menstrual pain functioning
Publications
Supervision
Current PhD Students
Teaching
Katy has previously co-ordinated undergraduate modules in clinical and health psychology, and work-based learning (placements). She is interested in developing students' research skills and currently supervises students at undergraduate, Master's and doctoral levels, and understanding how to link theory and practice in clinical psychology. Previously she has also delivered workshops in the 'Person-Based Approach' to developing behaviour change interventions.