Biography
Clinical Psychology Trainee
Lee Rusowicz is a 3rd year Trainee Clinical Psychologist at The University of Manchester and Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust. Before starting his clinical training, he had experience as a healthcare support worker in a private mental health rehabilitation hospital in North Wales and had assistant psychologist posts in Neuropsychology at the Walton Centre and Cheshire and Wirral’s Acquired Brain Injury Service, as well as delved into the medicolegal sector with Tribune Neuropsychology Services.
Lee Rusowicz was awarded a BSc in Applied Psychology from Liverpool John Moore’s University in 2017 and an MSc in Clinical Neuropsychology at Bangor University the following year. In the research dissertation for his MSc, he explored the differences in emotion regulation strategies between people with and without acquired brain injury. Specifically, he examined how cognitive control process such as working memory and executive functioning correlated with one’s proclivity and ability in using cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, and the consequences of using each.
His interest in the latter project partially influenced decision-making in the current empirical study of his DClinPsy thesis. For the study, he is investigating how another type of suppression – thought suppression – and its rebound and amplification are affected by one’s metacognitive beliefs. Additional interest will be afforded to how the ways in which people suppress their thoughts relieve discomfort following the suppression of intrusive thoughts. He is also conducting a systematic review of the literature comparing metacognitive beliefs to cognitive beliefs such as inflated responsibility and perfectionism in their explanation of obsessive-compulsive symptomology.