Dr Eve Holden

Dr Eve Holden

Associate Lecturer

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2272
Email
eh54@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Biography

I joined the University of St Andrews in 2022 as an Associate Lecturer. I teach statistics and developmental psychology, and supervise undergraduate and masters research projects. I sit on the school ethics and Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) committees and am a member of the Primate Society of Great Britain's EDI subcommittee.

Before joining St Andrews I worked as a Lecturer in Psychology in the at the University of Dundee. I completed my PhD in Developmental and Comparative Psychology at the University of York. I completed both my BSc in Psychology with Biology and my MSc in Evolutionary and Comparative Psychology, at the University of St Andrews.

Teaching

  • PS2001 Advanced Principles of Psychology 1: Statistics lectures, statistics labs, and tutorials
  • PS2002 Advanced Principles of Psychology 2: Statistics lectures, statistics labs, and tutorials
  • PS3023 Psychological Statistics and Research Methods 3A: Workshops
  • PS4040 Psychology Review: Supervisor
  • PS3033/ PS5233 Developmental Psychology: Module organiser, lectures, labs, and tutorials
  • PS4299/PS4050 Psychology Project: Supervisor 
  • PS5013 Origins of Mind: Psychology Master's Research Project: Supervisor

Examples of project supervision topics:

  • Parenting and infant/child social experiences (in humans) and how this might be impacted by aspects such as socio-demographic background and/or neurodiversity
  • Beliefs about animal minds & attribution of emotion to animals
  • Social relationships in non-human primates and mother-offspring experience and relationships
  • Non-human primate mother behaviour
  • Other topics of interest include communication, cooperation/prosociality, joint attention, and social learning

Research areas

My research interests lay in developmental and comparative psychology.

I conduct research on variation in human experience and perceptions of the world in parents, infants, and people with neurodevelopmental conditions. I am particularly interested in lived experience, social cognition, and social emotional development in real-world contexts, especially in diverse participants, such as across varied cultural and socio-demographic contexts and across neurodiversity.

In non-human primates, I am interested in using observational methods to understand communication and social behaviour, and mother-offspring relations.

My PhD thesis looked at early experience and joint attention in human infants from the UK and Uganda, as well as infant chimpanzees and macaques. I have first-hand experience with a wide variety of research methods including using observational methods, questionnaires, interviews, and behavioural experiments with humans in the UK and Uganda. I also have experience with observational vocal and behavioural data collection with wild non-human primates (vervet monkeys and chimpanzees).

Selected ongoing projects:

  • Factors affecting parental attitudes and parenting approaches (e.g. parenting during Covid-19 lockdowns, and socio-demographic variables)
  • Relationships between childhood experience, ADHD, SES, and social support on parenting stress and parenting self-efficacy
  • Experiences of women with late ADHD diagnoses
  • Social behaviour in crested macaques and chimpanzees
  • Chimpanzee vocal communication
  • Cross cultural development of social cognition in infants
  • Techniques teachers can apply to enhance university student learning 

Selected publications

 

See more publications