Professor Ronan O'Carroll

Professor

Psychology University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA

Professor Ronan O'Carroll

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About me

Professor Ronan O'Carroll FRSE, FAcSS, FEHPS & FHEA is a Clinical and Health Psychologist who is  interested in health, behaviour and medicine. He is also a registered Clinical Neuropsychologist. He is past President of the UK Society for Behavioural Medicine. He has published over 250 papers in peer-reviewed journals and his work has been cited over 20,000 times. In August 2024 his Google Scholar h-index was 78 with an i10-index of 222.

History He graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1979 with a BSc in Biological Sciences, with Honours in Psychology. He then completed an MRC funded PhD studentship (1980-83) entitled "The behavioural effects of androgens in man" in Edinburgh. His PhD thesis was awarded the Kinsey Institute International Prize by the University of Indiana, USA for outstanding doctoral research in 1984. Two of the papers from his PhD now have accrued more than 230 citations each. He then trained as a Clinical Psychologist in Edinburgh (1983-85), and then worked as an NHS Clinical Psychologist in Edinburgh (1985-88) before moving to Canada, to take up an Assistant Professor position at Memorial University, helping to run a Clinical Psychology post-graduate programme (1988-90). He returned to Scotland, and took up a position as Senior Scientist at the Medical Research Council Brain Metabolism Unit in Edinburgh (1990-96), before accepting a post as Senior Research Fellow at the University of Stirling (1996-99). He was then appointed Professor of Psychology at the University of St Andrews (1999-2003), before returning to take up the post of Professor of Psychology at the University of Stirling in February 2003. He is still here....

Academic Roles In November 2019 he was appointed as the Behaviour Change Expert to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) “Vaccine uptake in the general population” public health guideline committee. NICE provides national guidance and advice to improve health and social care. He also served on the NICE organ transplantation clinical guideline development group (2010, 2013, 2016). He was appointed as an Expert Adviser for the NICE Centre for Guidelines (2017-2020). In 2017 he was appointed to the NIHR Policy Research Unit Commissioning Panel. He was a member of UK National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Health Services & Delivery Research Grants Board (2010-2017) and the UK NIHR Programme Grants Board for Applied Research (2011-2014). He was the British Psychological Society Representative on the Executive Committee of Scottish Intercollegiate Guideline Network (SIGN) (2009-2021). He was Chair of the Scientific Programme Committee for the International Congress of Behavioural Medicine (ICBM) 2014. He was Associate Editor of Health Psychology and the British Journal of Health Psychology. He serves on the Editorial Boards of Annals of Behavioral Medicine, Psychology and Health, British Journal of Health Psychology and the Journal of Behavioural Medicine.

Honours and Awards Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences (2012). Distinguished International Affiliate of the Division of Health Psychology (Division 38) of the American Psychological Association (2013). Fellow of the European Health Psychology Society (2014). British Psychological Society outstanding Contribution to Research in Health Psychology Prize (2016). Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2017).

General area of research interest - why don't we do what doctors want us to do? I am particularly interested in the role of emotion in guiding our health decision-making. Examples : (a) Organ transplantation and strategies to increase donor registrations, (b) Increasing participation in cancer screening. and (c) Improving adherence to medication and treatment guidelines.

Example Research Projects  A pilot telephone intervention to incease uptake of breast cancer screening in Scotland (TELBRECS) Anticipated Regret to Increase CRC Screening (ARTICS)  Increasing organ donation via anticipated regret: (INORDAR)  Improving Adherence to Medication in stroke Survivors (IAMSS) 

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