Brescia Faculty profiles with the buzz october edition: Dr. Anne Barnfield
Welcome to Brescia faculty profiles! Every month, we’ll cover a different professor from a different faculty so you can expand your knowledge of the different faculties we offer at Brescia and learn more about your profs!
Anne Barnfield is originally from the UK and received her undergrad and doctorate from the University of Sussex and London. Barnfield didn’t always want to go into psychology. When she started her undergrad at the University of London, she was planning to go into biology; however, after a course in bio-psychology, she became more and more interested in the subject of psychology. According to Barnfield, her interests were split almost 50/50 between biology and psychology. For her experimental at university, she studied the effects of drugs on neurotransmitters in the brain. In England, her research largely looked more at the biological side of chemistry. Once she came to Western and Brescia, where those labs do not necessarily exist, she started looking more at the human side of psychology. From then, she stayed in the path of experimental psychology and eventually branched into her current research at SARI therapeutic riding, a horse field that specializes in animal therapy.
Now, Barnfield is a celebrated professor at Brescia, receiving Brescia University College Dean’s Honour Roll for Teaching five times, even as recent as 2018. She highly recommends the psychology department here at Brescia, saying, ‘we have a very good psychology department here at Brescia...we can cover a wide variety of things.’ At Brescia, you do not have to commit to one type of research or specialization in the psychology department; you can take courses on different aspects of psychology and specialize as you go on to what truly interests you.
As for a typical day in Dr. Barnfield’s life, there is not one. Every day is completely different from the last, what with courses, research, and her work with SARI therapeutic riding. Some days she goes out and visits her horse at the SARI therapeutic riding fields; some days, she lectures, and on Mondays, she helps out with the UWO Karate Club. ‘There’s flexibility,’ she said, ‘as long as you get your work done. But the days aren’t so typical. It really depends.’
Dr. Barnfield has done extensive and impressive work with the SARI therapeutic riding field, an organization that focuses on horse therapy. Specifically, Barnfield has worked with soldiers suffering from PTSD, monitoring their progress through horse therapy. She has also looked at women who have experienced sexual assault and monitored their progress at the therapeutic riding center. While talking about the effects of horse therapy, Barnfield said that, especially in cases where patients may not want to talk about their problems, it works much better than sitting on a couch and telling someone about your feelings. In one example, she spoke of a military veteran suffering from anger issues related to PTSD and how horse therapy helped him reach breakthroughs that regular treatment never really could.
Barnfield teaches on subjects such as sport and physical therapy, the effectiveness of therapeutic riding, and ethics in Psychology. Her office is in Ursuline Hall; if you see her around, make sure to say hi and ask her about her horse!