Department of Psychology, Counselling and Therapy facilities

Our studio is a purpose-built facility for experiential learning in Art Therapy. The studio has a spacious layout with abundant natural light, thanks to its wide windows that allow the surrounding environment to become an integral part of the learning space. This integration with nature creates a serene and inspiring atmosphere, fostering a sense of calm and creativity among students.

Students are provided with ample space and resources to engage in art-making processes – from painting and drawing to sculpting and mixed media – that promote self-discovery, emotional expression and personal growth. The layout encourages group work, discussion, sharing of ideas, and mutual support among students. The studio is also equipped with comfortable seating, inspiring artwork displays and flexible workstations, creating a versatile environment that can adapt to a range of therapeutic learning activities and exercises. It features a fully equipped storage facility to accommodate a diverse range of art materials including paints, brushes, canvases, clay and sculpture tools.

La Trobe University’s DogLab at the Bendigo campus, and DogHub at the Bundoora campus, provide a laboratory and office space for research into anthrozoology (human-animal relationships). These open-plan spaces are ideal for designing studies to understand animal cognition and behaviour, and how people interact with animals. They have been used to study the development of scent detection abilities in dogs, whether reward-based clicker training is more effective than reward-based training without a clicker, and whether dogs fall for optical illusions like humans do. We have also investigated whether stress in students and staff decreased after a 20-minute interaction with a friendly puppy.

The DogLab and DogHub are also home to the assistance dog puppies-in-training who will eventually provide necessary disability support to their handler, who may be a veteran with treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder or a child with autism spectrum disorder. These puppies are trained by our partners at Dogs for Life.

The Department of Psychology, Counselling and Therapy offers family therapy training at state-of-the-art facilities located at The Bouverie Centre, a practice-research centre embedded in the School of Psychology and Public Health. Students in the Master of Clinical Family Therapy work with families from the Centre’s Clinical Program as part of their degree, using observation rooms and those with one-way windows. This provides the ideal learning context where students can do live work, supported by a team of other students, and supervised by teachers with high-level experience in both teaching and clinical practice with families.

We have a proud history in biological psychology and neuroscience. Our scientists have access to state-of-the-art behavioural and cognitive neuroscience testing facilities and use a range of technical approaches including histology, immunohistochemistry, and neurochemistry; pharmacology and virally-mediated gene delivery; molecular interaction analysis and bioinformatics; eye-tracking; electrophysiology; transcranial magnetic stimulation, magnetoencephalography; and functional magnetic resonance imaging.

La Trobe’s Psychology Clinic operates at the University’s Bundoora campus. It enables provisionally registered psychologists in our postgraduate programs to learn in real-life practice settings with clients from the community, supervised by nationally registered psychologists with expertise in the services offered.

The Clinic is committed to excellence and uses current, evidence-based psychological treatments. It is open to the community and provides affordable, evidence-based psychological services for people of all ages. Our services are tailored to the client’s needs, from a single consultation to more specialised sessions that will help them to achieve their goals.

Find out more about the La Trobe Psychology Clinic.