Dr Steven Gillespie PhD, FHEA

I am interested in psychopathic personality traits in both offender and non-offender samples, and how heightened levels of these traits can affect the processing of social and affective cues. For example, I am interested in how psychopathic traits affect the recognition of others emotional facial expressions, the visual exploration of faces, and physiological responses to threatening and other affective stimuli. I am also interested in how psychopathic traits affect our judgments of other peoples intentions, beliefs and emotions. In recent work we have examined how co-morbid traits (e.g., psychosis) affects the relationship of psychopathic traits with these abilities.

I also research the characteristics of people who have committed sexual offences, including male and female perpetrators of sexual abuse, and users of online child sexual exploitation material. Our work explores the cognitive and affective mechanisms that differentiate people who have sexually offended from people who have committed other types of offences, and people living in the community without a history of offending. Our work has also focussed on improving the effectiveness of treatment given to people who have sexually offended, with a particular focus on improving emotion regulation (e.g., through the use of mindfulness techniques).