Profile

Hi! I’m Naomi and science is my jam. My pronouns are she/her. I’m a psychology researcher and science communicator. I live in Bath with my boyfriend, dangerously close to a lot of takeaway restaurants. When I’m not trying to figure out what’s going on in people’s brains, I’m making videos, watching Disney movies or playing old video games.

I work at the University of Bath, where I am a PhD student in the Department of Psychology. I investigate how we combine information from the different senses to make emotional judgements. We can use different sources of information to help us work out what other people are feeling – including their facial expression, their tone of voice, their posture and even their smell! Check out my short video here to learn more: http://www.senselesspsych.com/videos/better-together-combining-the-senses-in-social-processing

I am especially interested in how these multisensory processes might differ from person to person – what we call ‘individual differences’ in psychology. In my research, I focus particularly on people who experience high levels of daily anxiety, and people who have experienced traumatic life events in the past. These groups of people can be hypersensitive to threat, and so sometimes end up making more negative judgements about the world around them compared to other people. I am trying to figure out why this is, and whether multisensory emotion processing might play an important role. I hope that my work will contribute to improved treatments for people who are affected by these conditions.

To do my research, I use computer tasks where people have to make judgements about emotional faces, voices and body gestures. I also use a technology called EEG to measure electrical activity from the brain. The picture below shows me wearing an EEG headset, which is what I use to measure this brain activity.

I get up in the morning (normally much later than I set my alarm!) and head to University. I check all my equipment is working, which can be tricky as my research involves lots of bits of electrical equipment that all have to be connected up correctly.

Then I welcome the people who have volunteered to help me with my research, and help them fit the EEG equipment that I use to measure their brain activity. I also use sensors placed on the chest and hand to measure some other biological responses, like heart rate and changes in the electrical properties of the skin. These responses can tell us something about how a person is feeling and how their emotions change in response to changes in the environment. Below is a picture of a research participant all set up wearing the EEG equipment and a picture of me wearing the sensors that I use to measure heart rate.

The participants complete some tasks where they have to judge emotion from faces and voices. Below is an example of the type of images and sounds that participants have to make judgements about in my computer tasks. Once participants have completed the computer tasks, I make sure all their responses and brain data are recorded correctly, ready for me to analyse later on.

I spend the rest of the day testing more participants, looking at the data I have collected, or writing about my findings for blogs or articles. The data I collect has to undergo a lot of cleaning and processing before it is very useful. Below is an example of what the EEG data looks like when it is first recorded vs. what I end up with after many hours of computer coding and processing.