Disa Sauter

Disa Sauter studies social and affective communication, particularly the use of vocal signals in communicating emotional states. She did her PhD at University College London with Professor Sophie Scott, investigating non-verbal emotional vocalizations using a range of methodologies including experimental psychology, fMRI, acoustic analysis, and cross-cultural comparisons. She then investigated emotion perception in autism as a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. In 2007, she received an ESRC fellowship to study the time course of emotional sound processing with Professor Martin Eimer at Birkbeck College London. She is currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Comparative Cognitive Anthropology group, with a particular interest in cross-cultural aspects of emotional communication. She is currently investigating the role of auditory learning in affective vocalizations, children's understanding of emotional signals, the phylogenetic continuity of emotional sounds, and the conceptual space underlying categories of emotions across languages.