Hello
I started studying faces as an undergraduate at the University of Durham (1995-1998) where I examined the accuracy of personality judgements to faces from an evolutionary perspective. I continued my interest in face perception during an MSc at the University of Stirling (1998-1999) and then a PhD at the University of St Andrews supervised by David Perrett where I worked on evolutionary approaches to judgements of facial attractiveness and sexual selection (1999-2004).
I lectured for 2 years at the University of Liverpool in the School of Biological Sciences where I taught biological and evolutionary psychology before being awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2005. I held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (2005-2013) at Liverpool and then moved to the University of Stirling to the School of Natural Science. I moved to the University of Bath in 2016 and I am currently a Reader in the Department of Psychology.
My interests lie in what information is available from faces and what information people take from them. My work has examined mate choice, cognition, social cognition and individual differences.
Research Interests
- Face perception: how people extract social, cognitive, and biological information from faces.
- Attractiveness & mate choice: evolutionary influences on facial preferences.
- Social cognition: personality judgments, trust, dominance, and first impressions.
- Individual differences: how traits shape perception and decision‑making.
- Cognition & behaviour: links between facial cues and behavioural outcomes.
Me (top left) as a woman, a baby, and a chimp.
Me in my mid‑20s (as a woman etc...)
