About

Andrew Surtees

Bio

I am an Associate Professor in psychology at the University of Birmingham and qualified Clinical Psychologist.

Throughout my research career I’ve been interested in how people are able to understand the minds of others.  In my own experience, we’re sometimes surprisingly good at this and at others surprisingly poor.

I first became interested in how children are able to understand others and how this develops as they get older.  In my PhD I showed that children (aged 6-11) became much faster and more accurate at taking other people’s perspective as they got older.  Perhaps surprisingly, they seemed to be using similar processes to adults.  This included sometimes treating people in the same way as “fronted objects”- like chairs.

I was awarded a 2-year Research Fellowship by the Marie Curie Actions for the European Commission in 2011.  Through this I worked at the catholique université de Lovain. There I became particularly interested in the sorts of processes adults employed to help them understand other people’s perspectives.  I also developed collaborations using EEG and fMRI to understand how these processes were subserved in the brain.

From 2014-2016, I completed a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology to expand my research into atypical populations and develop applied skills. I’ve become particularly interested in the interplay between sleep, social understanding and social behaviour.

After 18-months working full-time in the NHS, I now split my time between Academic and Clinical posts.

Currently

I am leading a wide-range of projects that expand on my background in “basic scientific” work in social cognition and develop translational research in clinical psychology.

My central research questions are:

How do human beings understand the minds of other people?

How do abilities in social understanding develop over the lifepan?

How do we help groups of people who have problems with social understanding?