Profile

My particular areas of interest in psychology are evolutionary psychology and animal behaviour. Outside of work I enjoy playing football, table tennis, chess, and the piano.

I specialise in human mate choice, which is how people find partners and what they find attractive in each other. This is really important for all sexually reproducing species, because if you cannot find a partner, you cannot reproduce. I use computer graphics software to digitally manipulate faces, for example to make them older or younger, or masculine or feminine, and more or less attractive. Here is an example of an average face created by blending together several men’s faces.

The one on the left has then been masculinised and the one on the right feminised by changing the shape towards the average male or female shape. And here I have done the same thing to my face:

Whenever we make a judgment about whether someone is attractive, we are unconsciously assessing whether they would make a suitable mate to share our genes with. Animals make the same sort of decisions, so evolution helps us to understand the behaviour of all different species.

In the morning, I get up in time to take my children to school. I cycle with my daughter. At work, my time, is split between teaching and research. So I might have a lecture one day, or individual meetings with students on another. Lectures can be in front of 200+ students, which is quite daunting, and goes on for 2 hours.

Then I might spend the rest of the day doing research. I might collect some photographs which I then prepare for experiments about attractiveness.

Other activities include reading the latest research from other scientists, helping students run their own experiments, writing up my results for publication, presenting my work at conferences. Hopefully not all on the same day though.