Biography

I graduated from the University of Portsmouth in 1997 with a BSc (Hons) Psychology degree, which ended in the final year project ‘Deceiving and Detecting Deceit when the Stakes are High: The Behaviour of a Murderer During Police Interviews Analysed’. Continuing my interest in deceptive behaviour, I then commenced research for a PhD (funded by the ESRC), which involved analysing the behaviour of high-stake liars and truth-tellers, specifically videos of suspects in their police interviews. I then showed clips of these suspects to police officers to see if they could tell when they were lying or truth-telling. This research culminated in her thesis ‘Suspects, lies and videotape: An investigation into telling and detecting lies in police/suspect interviews’ in 2001.

After a couple of years in research posts outside academia, I returned to Portsmouth in 2003 to embark on a 3-year ESRC project with Professor Vrij on enhancing deception detection through increasing cognitive load in interview situations. I have just commenced another project with Vrij designed to facilitate lie detection in interview situations.

Research interests

My current research interests include:Nonverbal cues to deception;  People’s perceptions of deceptive behaviour;  Professional lie detectors’ ability to detect deceit;  Enhancing interview situations in order to facilitate deception detection;  Speech related cues to deception (Reality Monitoring).