GESTURES
My research into the psychology of gestures began in 1997 and I’ve published many academic journal articles and conference presentations worldwide. Many of these are listed on on the list of academic publications section on this website. A seminal paper showed that children’s gestures are a window to their cognitive and linguistic processes.
My team in the GESTURES AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH CENTRE at the University of Hertfordshire includes Dr Liz Kirk, Dr Daniel Gurney and Neil Howlett.
Liz works on parent-infant interaction and gesture use and her thesis looked at the impact of encouraging infants to gesture on their language development.
Daniel researches adults’ gesture use and the effects of gestures on memory recall in adults. Neil is research assistant and for his MSc researched the link between maternal stress and baby signing.
Daniel won the British Psychological Society prize for his research poster: ‘Can misleading hand gestures influence eye-witness testimony’. (Click on the link to download).
The focus of my work has been on how gestures are far more than communicative devices, they facilitate cognitive and linguistic processes. In children, particularly, knowledge emerges in gesture before it is present in the child’s speech, so gestures provide a window into the child’s thinking. My work has investigated gesture as an educational tool as well as a means of assessment of cognitive level. We all think with our bodies, not just with our brains, and the study of gestures gives a fascinating insight into this process.
I have supervised PhDs into the effectiveness of babysign (using gestural communication with pre-verbal infants), baby sign and maternal stress and into how gestures can skew memory representations. The results were presented to the BRITISH PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY CONFERENCE in Sept. 2010 and to the ASSOCIATION OF INFANT MENTAL HEALTH CONFERENCE in 2011.
For more about this work see my University page
FASHION PSYCHOLOGY
FASHION AS NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION AND FLEXIBILITY
In 2011 I became Professor of the Psychology of Fashion at Bilgi University, Istanbul and gave an inaugural public lecture on The Psychology of Fashion.
As humans we also communicate a great deal about ourselves via the medium of personal style and dress. I try to pay a lot of attention to this, personally and professionally. Because, if we’re not careful, personal style can also become a straightjacket, in the way that behavioural habits can. So the Do Something Different philosophy extends to the wardrobe as well as the mind. We should use more than just 10% of it. Recent research on enclothed cognition demonstrates a powerful link between a person’s attire and the way they behave,
I am currently researching a number of topics related to the psychology of fashion, including the effects of subtle manipulations in clothing upon first impressions, and also how dress can affect the wearer’s mood or affective state and serve to regulate emotions.
You can download a summary of the results of the study into The Effects of Clothing on First Impressions here.
I have developed the Fashion Literacy Test, download here and am continuing to research image, fashion and personal style in my work in the UK and in Istanbul.
in 2012 my research shed light on how clothing exerts an influence on our psychological and emotional processes – Happiness: It’s not in the jeans.
Future projects include a new book on The Psychology of Fashion, participation with Istanbul Bilgi University fashion students at the 2012 Istanbul Design biennale and organising a Fashion psychology conference in the UK for 2013.
