Projects
What are the mechanisms of stereotype threat?
Stereotype threat describes a situation where membership of a group (such as gender or race) together with awareness of the stereotype associated with that group causes underperformance on tasks relevant to that stereotype. This ESRC funded project research seeks to investigate the minimal necessary conditions to produce stereotype threat and the resultant underperformance. It also examines the opposite and positive effect of "stereotype lift".
How does adult attachment affect group identification?
This project focuses on the role that attachment style plays in group identification, following relationship threat.
How does a child's social environment affect their acquisition of cultural information, such as stereotypes?
Children are cultural magnets, acquiring the traditions of their environments. This project explores the level of influence a child's immediate environment has on his/her acquisition of more general cultural information, such as stereotypes.
What role do the perceived expertise and intention of a demonstrator have on the subsequent behaviour of a learner in an observational learning setting?
When presented with a series of models performing a novel task we may chose to learn only from those who appear to be expert or, at the very least, profess to be an expert. Our work investigates how the perceived expertise of an individual interacts with that individual's age and competence. We propose to extend our current work with child, to investigate similar questions with chimpanzees.
What elements within a demonstration are critical to an observer's success at a task?
When learning a novel task there are many aspects that an observer can attend to including, the result of the actions, the physical movements of the apparatus, or the bodily movements of the model. Our work investigates the role that these different forms of information play when an individual (child or chimpanzee) learns by watching another individual.
What are the visual cues that enable us to perceive and identify emotions expressed in facial and body postures and movements?
This work involves assessing the abilities to discriminate and identify emotions from static and moving displays of facial and bodily expressed emotions in which various stimulus properties (e.g. form, motion) have been manipulated. Participants include typically developing adults and children, and individuals with autism, tested using behavioural measures (e.g. recognition accuracy, reaction time, rating scales) and eye-tracking equipment.
What are the visual cues that enable us to judge trustworthiness and other personality traits from the form and motion of faces and bodies?
This work involves assessing the abilities to judge trustworthiness and other personality traits from displays of facial and bodily movement using behavioural measures (e.g. recognition accuracy, reaction time, rating scales) and eye-tracking equipment. Participants include typically developing adults, although the work may be extended to children and/or clinical populations.
How does the brain process visual cues for perceiving emotional expressions and trustworthiness or other personality traits?
This work involves testing individuals with brain lesions with tasks such as those mentioned above, as well as conducting experiments with typically developing adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
How do film makers manipulate audiences' emotional responses?
This work is investigating how effective certain key components of films are in eliciting emotional responses in audiences. Measurements include physiological responses (e.g. skin conductance, facial electromyography), rating scales and questionnaires.
What are the developmental precursors of adult mate choice?
Although children and adults agree about which faces are attractive from birth onwards, it is not clear what it is about ‘attractive' faces that we and they prefer. This research project aims to investigate the basis of children's judgements of facial attractiveness by examining the development of preferences for faces varying in general attractiveness and also known dimensions which contribute to attractiveness in adult studies.
Why do body preferences vary?
Although previously preferences for female body shape had been considered a cross-cultural universal, more recent evidence has shown systematic differences between certain populations. Mechanisms leading such variation include, conditional adaptations triggered by local resource availability, associative learning regarding cues to healthiness/status/etc, and low level perceptual adaptation to those bodies frequently observed. This project uses experimental methods to test between these competing explanations of body preference variation.
What are the evolutionary causes and proximate mechanisms of women's masculinity preferences?
Women vary in their preferences for male facial ‘masculinity' in ways which suggest masculinity cues for ‘good' genetic material. We are studying both what is ‘good' about these genes and also how women acquire these preferences.
Does oxytocin play a role in defensive aggression?
The neuropeptide oxytocin decreases anxiety and increases social bonding. Most researchers have focused on prosocial effects. But oxytocin-mediated fear reduction has been associated with aggressiveness in other species. Might the same be true of humans?
How can we explain the absence of sex differences in partner-directed aggression?
Cross-culturally men are more severely and more frequently aggressive to women-where the target of the aggression is same-sex or unspecified. These behavioural sex differences are eliminated in partner aggression (though women sustain more injuries as a result of men's greater strength). We are conducting a number of studies to examine why this might be.
Is there a sex difference in impulsivity?
Despite the manifest over-representation of men in psychopathologies associated with high impulsivity such as ADHD, conduct disorder, psychopathy, drug and alcohol abuse, many (but not all) standard psychometric inventories reveal no sex differences. Are there simply more extreme scorers among men than women? Or is there a special form of impulsivity, detected by only some of the inventories, that differs between men and women?