Bath Spa University

Faculty Member, School of Science, Society & Management

Other Affiliations: University of Oxford, Anthropology

Lecturer in Psychology

About

At Bath Spa I will be coordinating the compulsory second-year undergraduate module on Developmental Psychology and the optional third-year module on Evolutionary Psychology.

I am also still working with the Interactions Lab (part of the School of Management at the University of Bath) on an EU-funded project called SIREN (Social games for conflIct REsolution based on natural iNteraction) - see www.sirenproject.eu. For the first year of this project I have been investigating existing causes of conflict and strategies of conflict resolution in local schools. I used a combination of direct observation, student and teacher interviews and storyboarding to find out what schools need from a conflict resolution program. For the second and third parts of the project we will be involving children in the actual design and evaluation of the game, to ensure that it is something that kids will find useful and enjoy playing.

In 2009 I completed my PhD, entitled "Young children's reporting of peers' behaviour". This is the phenomenon known as "tattling" in the US, or "telling tales" over here. I used a mix of participant observation and behavioral ecology to study tattling in two Belfast pre-schools. I also conducted experiments with children to see how well they recall various types of social and non-social information, and analyzed instances of tattling in the CHILDES and HRAF databases. My work is informed by an evolutionary perspective: I see tattling as an early example of an innovative human tendency to resolve disputes by bringing them into the public sphere, rather than by direct one-on-one confrontation. In this respect, tattling is similar to gossip in adults, but it tends to be more overt, more immediate and more negative.

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