Amy Hayes
Bangor University
Welsh Crucible 2014
Amy is a lecturer in the School of Sport, Health and Exercise Sciences at Bangor University. After earning her BSc degree in Engineering at University of California, Berkeley, she completed a PhD in Psychology at University of Oregon. She is particularly interested in connections between human perceptual motor processes and emotion. Her research has demonstrated that the fluency of everyday actions, such as simply grasping an item and moving it to a new location on a table, evokes an emotional response, indicating that the way we perform motor actions has a more pervasive effect on our emotional state than is commonly appreciated. Amy is interested in applying her work to wide ranging fields, including understanding aesthetic experiences, product and technology design, efficacy of movement-based psychotherapies, and the benefits of physical activity for education.
2016 Update: Amy continues her role as a Lecturer in the School of Sport, Health and Exercise Science at Bangor University. Amy is also the Acting Director of Postgraduate Research.