I am a postgraduate research student at the University of Glasgow where I am completing a PhD that’s funded by the ESRC/SGSSS and supervised by Dr David Simmons and Dr Neil McDonnell. As part of my work, I am hoping to use virtual reality to raise and lower anxiety to test its effect on sensory processing.
I am also interested in researching how longer-term anxiety is behaviourally expressed in autism, especially the use of video games as a coping mechanism. My other research interests are related to psychometrics, specifically including modelling the underlying structures of autism and effectively understanding the experiences of children.
PhD in Psychology, 2020 - present
University of Glasgow
MSc in Research Methods of Psychological Science, 2019 - 2020
University of Glasgow
MA(SocSci) in Psychology, 2015 - 2019
University of Glasgow
We know that some people have issues with their senses, especially autistic people. We developed a questionnaire asking children about their senses based on the adult version of the Glasgow Sensory Questionnaire. We found that sensory issues in children were less related to autism than we expected. We are not sure if this is because the children were answering the questionnaire differently or if they have more issues with their senses than we previously knew.
Video games are commonly enjoyed by autistic people, but we tend to think about this using a medical model. In a questionnaire filled out by 57 people, we found that people with more autistic traits were more motivated to play video games. In particular, people with higher autistic traits were more likely to play games to help with their anxiety.