Research Interests

My primary areas of research interest are in the fields of social psychology, social cognition, and political science. These include:

Group membership: how racial, cultural, and perceived group membership influences perception of, and behaviour towards, in-groups and out-groups. This research encompasses theory from a macro (e.g., cultural genocide) to micro (e.g., individual differences in prejudice type) level, and explores other-race and same-race issues, such as European immigration and perception of nationality. Current research examines the perception of Muslims in UK society.

Emotion recognition: how non-verbal communication (nvc) may differ through the use of display rules, particularly in nvc between members of different cultural and racial groups. In particular, examining whether a dialect theory of emotion expression influences universal emotions, and whether this is influenced by cognitive processing and attitude.

Face recognition: how featural and configural encoding and processing influences the recognition of in-group and out-group members. Whether individual differences in attitude influence encoding type and recognition of faces.

Media influence: how the media influences attitudes and decision-making, particularly decisions involving political attitudes (voting, understanding policy, etc.).