Soc Dev Lab at Science Festival 2023!

The Soc Dev Lab was thrilled to be back at Royal Holloway’s Science Festival on Saturday 27th May 2023!

A day of science exploration and discovery, Royal Holloway showcased it’s thriving science community, with a huge variety of hands-on demonstrations and activities for visitors to take part in. The Social Development Lab kept busy with our two research activities led by PhD students, Zain Khan and Gemma Rides, with support from Prof. Dawn Watling and Abigail Keizner.

Zain led a demonstration titled ‘Recognising emotions in faces – can conflicting information impact processing of information?’ – This demonstration was really popular with parents, and their children, with some parents wanting to try repeat the task multiple times to try and gain a better emotion recognition accuracy! Check out Zain’s blog post to read more about her Science Festival experience.

Gemma led a demonstration titled ‘ Why doesn’t anyone ‘like’ me? – Links between social media interactions and feelings of social anxiety’. This task involved participants interacting with a mock social media site that Gemma uses in her research. Gemma had some interesting discussions with parents and children about their thoughts and feelings whilst online, and linking this to some of the physiological responses we might experience when using social media platforms.

We all had a great day and are looking forward to seeing everyone again next year!