Rate My Professor Tash Sivananthan

Dr. Tash Sivananthan serves as an Associate Lecturer and Academic Lead for First Year Undergraduate Education in the School of Psychological Sciences within the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences at Macquarie University. Her academic journey began at Macquarie University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in Psychology. She continued with an Honours project, supervised by Associate Professor Kim Curby and Dr. Peter de Lissa, exploring the impact of semantically meaningful information on the recognition of faces presented from different viewpoints. Sivananthan completed her Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at the same institution, with a thesis titled 'Investigating the Interaction between the Processing of Colour and Emotion', under the supervision of Associate Professor Kim Curby, Dr. Peter de Lissa, and Dr. Ian Stephen. In her teaching role, she delivers courses across undergraduate levels, including first-year units such as PSYU1100: Finding Your Foundation and Future and PSYU1101: Introduction to Psychology I; second-year units like PSYU2235: Developmental Psychology and PSYU2239: Perception and Cognition; and third-year units including PSYU3332: Principles of Psychological Assessment and PSYU3339: Applied Child and Adolescent Psychology. Her dedication to fostering critical thinking and appreciation for the scientific method in psychology has been recognized through student nominations for the Vice-Chancellor's Learning and Teaching Award.

Sivananthan employs experimental psychology techniques to uncover the intricate interactions between cognition and emotion. Her research focuses on the cognitive mechanisms through which contextual information modulates attention and memory, the effects of context on face processing, and the bidirectional influences of colour associations on emotion processing. Key publications from her work include "Mimicking facial expressions facilitates working memory for stimuli in emotion-congruent colours" co-authored with S. B. Most and K. M. Curby (Vision, March 2024), "Emotional face priming influences colour judgements" with K. Curby (Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2023), "Colour context effects on speeded valence categorization of facial expressions" with P. de Lissa and K. M. Curby (Visual Cognition, 2021, cited 10 times per Scopus), and "Facial emotions guide attention to task-irrelevant color cues" with S. B. Most and K. Curby (Journal of Vision, 2019). Through her contributions, Sivananthan advances understanding in perceptual and emotional processing within experimental psychology.