Profile

I originally come from Helsinki, Finland. I moved to Scotland to study when I was 19 and have stayed here ever since. Scottish people are really friendly, even though I really struggled understanding the accent at first!

I like travelling, seeing new places and knowing people from different countries. My favourite thing to do in a new country is to go to a normal supermarket and see what kind of food people eat.

I train karate three times a week with the university club – I just got my black belt last spring. I also like climbing and hiking.

I am trying to find out which words are more emotional than others, and how we react to emotional words. I’m doing this with a device called eye-tracker. It’s a very sci-fi-like headband that has cameras pointed at your eyes and it can tell exactly where your eyes are looking at, how they are moving and how big your pupils are.

When you are shown emotional words (such as ‘adventure’, ‘gunpoint’ or ‘mother’), your pupils react by getting bigger. For bilinguals this pupil reaction is usually smaller in their second language, meaning the second language is less emotional for them. As a result, it might be easier for them to talk about awkward topics and swear! I’m trying to find out why this happens and what makes you more emotional in a language.

Every day of work is different: within the last month I have taken participants into my lab to be tested, taught first year psychology students (and myself!) how to do programming, watched a school class present their amazing research projects, decorated our office with my office mate, written an essay and a started a report on the research I’m doing at the moment, and done some data analysis.

This is what I really like about my job – there is so much variation. Some things don’t change though; usually in the morning I have a cup of tea while we catch up with my office mate, and make a plan for the day. After that my days usually consist of testing participants, teaching, writing or doing data analysis.

If I won the money I would like to do a project with the Glasgow Science centre or a nearby school and tell people about what we do, and let them participate in doing the research.