Social Cognition and Communication

Dr Nicholas Longpré and Dr Dean Wilkinson

Research has revealed that stalking is not an isolated event and is often associated with sexual violence (SV) and intimate partner violence (IPV) (Stefanska & Longpré, 2024). Stalking, SV and IPV are serious public health issues, where women and non-binary people are disproportionally victimized (Beckett & Longpré, 2023).  

There is limited access to stalking actuarial scales to assess the risk of violence and future related offences (Longpré et al., 2023). Furthermore, the low predictive value of some measures, some based on weak empirical support, hinder our efforts to effectively assess the risk of stalking, especially in the context of SV and IPV. Not all risk factors are likely to be equally related to the same risk and a careful consideration of the context and how it might impact the level of risk should increase our ability to predict the outcome and course of actions needed (Longpré et al., 2024).  There is an urgent need to determine whether there is a particular threshold along the stalking continuum that would call for specific interventions.

Professor Linda Kaye and Dr James Brand

Given the popularity of emoji within everyday communication, it is pertinent to establish the extent to which the concepts emoji represent might correspond to conceptual knowledge stored in semantic memory. For example, when we perceive pizza emoji, do we integrate gustatory and olfactory sensory affordances to this, in the way we might do when we perceive this object in the physical world? We aim to  quantify the perceptual and action strength of concepts represented in emoji. . From this, we can then explore issues such as how  sensorimotor strength of emoji might facilitate how we process them. With this knowledge, we might then be well placed to test how perceptual affordances of emoji might relate to a range of cognitive and behavioural outcomes.

Dr Dean Wilkinson and Dr Joyce Humphries

Courtroom decisions should be made exclusively on the evidence presented. However, decades of research show that jurors often rely on extra-legal factors, particularly when the evidence is ambiguous or complex, which can lead to biased decision-making (Devine et al., 2009; 2016). In such situations, individuals often rely on cognitive shortcuts, known as heuristics, which are associated with less effortful processing and more biased decision-making (Chiken 1980), raising significant concerns in legal contexts.   Individuals with high levels of schizotypal characteristics (Lenzenweger, 2006), often exhibit the cognitive “jump to conclusion” bias, making decisions quickly based on minimal evidence (Huq et al., 1998). It is also associated with a tendency to persist in endorsing initial decision(s) even when confronted with evidence that contradicts or challenges them (Orenes et al., 2012). While most studies have focused on examining decision-making in schizotypy using probabilistic tasks (e.g., Galbraith, Manktelow & Morris, 2008), limited research has investigated this issue using crime-based scenarios (e.g, Wilkinson & Caulfield, 2017), and none has specifically addressed courtroom contexts.

Dr Felicity Wolohan and Dr Valeria Occelli

Loneliness is associated with a range of negative effects on physical and mental health and has been recently declared by the World Health Organisation as a global public health concern. Within the UK, chronic loneliness affects approximately 7.1% of the population and is thought to cost the economy over £2.5 billion each year. In response to this, a multitude of interventions have been developed, however, recent systematic reviews suggest variation in terms of effectiveness. One factor identified as important in influencing the utility of interventions is their ability to speak to the relationships between loneliness and social cognition. However, there is a lack of longitudinal data muddies our understanding of the interplay and causal relationships between loneliness and social cognition. Secondly, studies do not address key aspects of social cognition that underpin successful social interactions and tend to be designed around lab-based computerised tasks lacking real-world validity.