Chris Roe, PhD
Honorary Research Fellow
Email: chris.roe@aleftrust.org
Biography
Chris Roe holds a Chair in Psychology at the University of Northampton, UK. He is the International Affiliate for England of the Parapsychology Foundation and is a Vice-President of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Chris served as the Perrott-Warrick Senior Researcher (2015-2021), Chair of the British Psychological Society Transpersonal Psychology Section (2015-2018), President of the Parapsychological Association (2015-2017), and as President of the SPR (2018-2021). He is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Parapsychology and is on the editorial board for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research and the Transpersonal Psychology Review. His research interests are around understanding the nature of anomalous experiences and includes research on the phenomenology of paranormal experience, particularly as it affects wellbeing, the psychology of paranormal belief and of deception, as well as experimental approaches to test claims for extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, particularly where they involve psychological factors. Recent research has been concerned with the relationship between altered states of consciousness and psychic experience. He has published over 140 journal papers and book chapters and given over 250 talks and conference presentations. He has supervised nineteen PhD students to successful completion, mainly in the areas of parapsychology and transpersonal psychology. He received the Parapsychological Association’s Outstanding Contribution Award in 2014, and the Outstanding Mentor Award in 2022. He received the University of Northampton’s Diamond Research Award for Excellence in Doctoral Supervision in 2020.
Research interests
Chris’s undergraduate degree was in Biological Sciences and his PhD was undertaken as part of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh, under the supervision of Prof Robert Morris, and focused on pseudo-psychic techniques called cold reading. He moved to the University of Northampton, where early experimental research focused on the role of ASCs in extrasensory perception, using dream ESP and ganzfeld methods. Thereafter, work shifted from being wholly quantitative to incorporate qualitative methods, focusing especially on the phenomenology of mediumship. He has additionally conducted work on collections of spontaneous cases, involving re-analysis of existing databases (from the Alister Hardy collection of spiritual experiences, the J.B. Priestly special collection of precognitive cases, and Peter Fenwick’s collection of NDE and OBE cases) as well as original research involving After-Death Communications and Terminal Lucidity respectively. Current experimental work focuses on EEG responses to ganzfeld stimulation, and replications of unconscious psi experiments originally proposed by Daryl Bem.
Key publications
Roe, C. A. (2020). Clinical parapsychology: The interface between anomalous experiences and psychological wellbeing. In J. Leonardi & B. Schmidt (Eds.), Spirituality and wellbeing: Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of religious experience and health (pp. 44-63). Equinox.
Roe, C. A., Cooper, C. E., Hickinbotham, L., Hodrien, A., Kirkwood, L., & Martin, H. (2020). Performance at a precognitive remote viewing task, with and without ganzfeld stimulation: Three experiments. Journal of Parapsychology, 84(1), 38-65. https://doi.org/10.30891/jopar.2020.01.06
Roe, C.A. (2017). Withering skepticism. Journal of Parapsychology, 81(2), 143-159.
Storm, L., Sherwood, S. J., Roe, C. A., Tressoldi, P. E., Rock, A. J., & Di Risio, L. (2017). On the correspondence between dream content and target material under laboratory conditions: A meta-analysis of dream-ESP studies, 1966-2014. International Journal of Dream Research, 10(2), 120-140. https://doi.org/10.11588/ijodr.2017.2.34888
