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Contact:  J.Lay@exeter.ac.uk

I am a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Exeter.

My research lies at the intersections of health / social / cultural psychology and adult lifespan development. I am broadly interested in how we navigate and make sense of our social and solitary lives, and how culture and development affect these processes. I take a methods-focused approach to research that centers participants’ lived experiences alongside ecological momentary assesments (EMA) and passive sensing using wearable devices (e.g. location tracking, stress biomarkers). I am passionate about modeling complex behavioural data and about teaching research methods and statistics.

Some of my current research topics:

• Experiences and functions of solitude (time to oneself) across the lifespan. For example, how can people derive benefits from solitude and loneliness? How do cultural norms shape solitude-seeking motivations?
• Accuracy of interoception and self-knowledge. For example, how do our self-concepts (beliefs about ourselves) bias our recall of past experiences? How might age-related changes in interoception affect health behaviours (e.g. responses to increasingly hot temperatures)?
• Participatory approaches and passive sensing tools for wellbeing. For example, how are geospatial patterns of helping behaviour linked with wellbeing in older adulthood? How can we use spoken & written language to detect neurocognitive disorders and loneliness?

After my PhD (Health Psychology; Quantitative Methods minor) at the University of British Columbia, Canada (Health and Adult Development Lab), I  worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Motivation and Emotion Lab) from 2018 to 2020. Before pursuing psychology full-time, I was a geomatics engineer (BSc, Schulich School of Engineering), and I continue to apply geospatial tools in my research.