Dr Eve Holden
Associate Lecturer
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
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Open access
Maternal attitudes and behaviours differentially shape infant early life experience: a cross cultural study
Holden, E., Buryn-Weitzel, J. C., Atim, S., Biroch, H., Donnellan, E., Graham, K. E., Hoffman, M., Jurua, M., Knapper, C. V., Lahiff, N. J., Marshall, S., Patricia, J., Tusiime, F., Wilke, C., Majid, A. & Slocombe, K. E., 21 Dec 2022, In: PLoS One. 17, 12, 30 p., e0278378.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review