My Introduction

I thought I would follow up Doreen's post with an introduction of my own! I am a (hopefully!) final year PhD student in the School of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol. I am a full time, self-funded international student from Canada.

I am interested in the study of  how we recognize emotional facial expressions. Recognizing the facial expressions of others is crucial to our every-day social interactions, and has an important effect on the perceived quality of these interactions. This in turn has an effect on our subsequent mood and behaviours. People who suffer from mental illnesses experience a number of cognitive biases, affecting a number of their mental processes from memory to perception. I am particularly interested in how these cognitive biases affect the perception of neutral or ambiguous facial expressions, and whether altering these biases results in improved mood. I work on developing a behavioural task to alter this negative cognitive bias by shifting the perception of these faces from negative to more positive.