A School of Psychology PhD student has been awarded the Pat Howlin Prize Lecture for a talk on social anxiety and motivation.

mace-hayley

Hayley Crawford has been investigating social impairments in people with rare genetic syndromes and neurodevelopmental disorders associated with intellectual disability.

She delivered her lecture, which was called The Effect of Adult Familiarity and Nature of Interaction on Social Anxiety and Motivation in Fragile X, Rubinstein-Taybi and Cornelia de Lange Syndromes, at the SSBP International Research Symposium in New York.

Hayley (pictured) graduated from the University of Birmingham in 2010 with a first class honours degree in Psychology.

She then worked as a research associate at the Cerebra Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders before securing funding from the ESRC to complete a Masters of Research degree and a PhD under the supervision of Professor Chris Oliver, Dr Joanna Moss and Dr Joseph McCleery.

She is currently using eye-tracking technology and behavioural observation to investigate social anxiety, social motivation and the processing of social information in children and adults with Fragile X, Cornelia de Lange and Rubinstein-Taybi syndromes, as well as autism spectrum disorder.