My PhD research aims to examine emotional processing deficits in adolescents who are characterised by antisocial behaviour. My research interests are in the area of developmental psychopathology and broadly include: Antisocial behaviour and the mechanisms involved in the development and severity of offending, and ADHD and its common co-occurrence with Conduct Disorder.

To achieve this I am currently working with the Cardiff Youth Offending Service aiming to improve the facial expression recognition of young offenders using an emotional intervention task and examine how these improvements relate to future offending. I am also working as part of a larger project with the School of Psychological Medicine on the differences in empathy deficits between adolescents with ADHD who do and do not display antisocial behaviours.

In my second year I am hoping to look at ways to improve emotional processing using the hormone oxytocin and also develop a new emotional processing task to examine pre-attention emotional processing.