Staff profile

Academic Interests

My main research focus is understanding how children perceive social signals. Primarily I'm interested in exploring the development of emotion recognition from the body, hands and voice using behavioural experiments, fMRI and point-light displays.

My current projects involve exploring the phenomenon of auditory emotional dominance in children (where children can't ignore what they hear), how individuals with autism spectrum disorder recognise emotions from the hands, and investigating the brain areas involved when children and adults recognise emotions from the human body.

Away from developmental work I'm part of an interdisciplinary team working with the Shared Services Forum UK on the 'Digital Voice' project, investigating how the rise of communication technologies during the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted on employee's voice and well-being.

I'm also a co-founder of the Wearable Ideologies (WE-ID) project, an international interdisciplinary research network exploring the ideologies of language on worn objects.

• Auditory dominance in children
• Importance of the hands in emotion recognition
• Typical developmental trajectories of emotion recognition
• Emotion recognition from the body and voice
• fMRI in children and adolescents

• Developmental Science

Available for media contact about:

• Psychology: Emotion Recognition

Journal Article

• Ross, P., Williams, E., Herbert, G., Manning, L. & Lee, B. (2023). Turn that music down! Affective musical bursts cause an auditory dominance in children recognising bodily emotions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 230: 105632.
• Cook, A, Thompson, M & Ross, P (2023). Virtual First Impressions: Zoom backgrounds affect judgements of trust and competence. PsyArXiv
• Ross, P. & George, E. (2022). Are Face Masks a Problem for Emotion Recognition? Not When the Whole Body Is Visible. Frontiers in Neuroscience 16: 915927.
• Weick, M., Couturier, L.-C., Vasiljevic, M., Ross, P., Cory, C.J., Crisp, R.J., Leite, A.C., Marcinko, A.J., Nguyen, T.T. & Van de Vyver, J. (2022). Building bonds: A pre-registered secondary data analysis examining linear and curvilinear relations between socio-economic status and communal attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 102: 104353.
• Ross, P, Atkins, B, Allison, L, Simpson, H, Duffell, C, Williams, M & Ermolina, O (2021). Children cannot ignore what they hear: Incongruent emotional information leads to an auditory dominance in children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 204: 105068.
• Ross, P. & Atkinson, A.P. (2020). Expanding simulation models of emotional understanding: The case for different modalities, body-state simulation prominence and developmental trajectories. Frontiers in Psychology 11: 309.
• Ross, P., de Gelder, B., Crabbe, F. & Grosbras, M.-H. (2020). A Dynamic Body-Selective Area Localizer for use in fMRI. MethodsX 7: 100801.
• Ross, P & Flack, T (2020). Removing hand form information specifically impairs emotion recognition for fearful and angry body stimuli. Perception 49(1): 98-112.
• Ross, P., de Gelder, B., Crabbe, F. & Grosbras, M.-H. (2019). Emotion Modulation of Body-Selective Areas in the Developing Brain. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 38: 100660.
• Whitney, C., Ross, P., Zhou, Z. & Strother, L. (2019). The Visual Word Form Area natively processes shape sequences: Implications for developmental dyslexia. PsyArXiv
• Whitney, C., Ross, P., Zhou, Z. & Strother, L. (2019). A novel hypothesis for the original functionality of the Visual Word Form Area: Processing shape sequences. PsyArXiv
• Grosbras, M.-H., Ross, P. & Belin, P. (2018). Categorical emotion recognition from voice improves during childhood and adolescence. Scientific Reports 8(1): 14791.
• Ross, P., de Gelder, B., Crabbe, F. & Grosbras, M.-H. (2014). Body-selective areas in the visual cortex are less active in children than in adults. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8: 941.
• Ross, P. (2014). Body form and body motion processing are dissociable in the visual pathways. Frontiers in Psychology 5: 767.
• Ross, P., Polson, L. & Grosbras, M.-H. (2012). Developmental Changes in Emotion Recognition from Full-Light and Point-Light Displays of Body Movement. PLoS ONE 7(9): e44815.

Newspaper/Magazine Article

• Ross,P (2022). Why you could have ‘face-ism’ – an extreme tendency to judge people based on their facial features. The Conversation
• Manning, J (2021). Why bad moods spread more easily than good moods – and how children read emotions. National Geographic
• Ross, P (2021). Why your kids know when you’re trying to put on a brave face. The Conversation
• Ansell, A (2021). Kids Recognize Emotion By What They Hear, Not What They See, Study Shows. verywellfamily.com
• Fadelli, I (2021). Children prioritize what they hear over what they see when gauging emotional aspects of their experience. Medical Xpress
• Steinmark, E (2013). The Pubertal Dip. Glasgow Insight into Science and Technology (2).