Rate My Professor Amy Dawel

Associate Professor Amy Dawel is an Associate Professor in Psychology in the School of Medicine and Psychology at the Australian National University. She holds a BA (Hons Psychology) and a PhD (Clinical Psychology), both awarded by ANU. Dr Dawel leads the ANU Emotions and Faces Lab. Her research investigates emotion regulation and face perception, with a focus on how these processes support human connection and wellbeing. A current research priority involves understanding how people perceive and interact with AI-generated personas, including the detection of deepfake faces and the potential for human-machine collaboration to improve AI detection capabilities. This work has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times and National Geographic. Her lab is also investigating relationships between AI chatbot use and children's wellbeing. Her research program is supported by the Australian Research Council and Australian Rotary Health. She has received the 2022 ACT Tall Poppy Science Award and the 2023 McMichael Award.

Dr Dawel serves as principal investigator on multiple projects, including Developing Evidence-Based Interventions to Prevent AI Chatbot Harms to Preteen Mental Health, Reading Facial Expressions from Real and Virtual (AI) Humans, The Australian National COVID-19 Mental Health, Behaviour and Risk Communication Survey, and The Psychology of Perceiving Artificial People. She is registered to supervise research students and maintains an active publication record in peer-reviewed journals on topics including facial expressions, emotion regulation, social media use and mental health, and the perception of artificial people. Her contributions have advanced understanding in clinical and cognitive psychology, particularly at the intersection of human emotion processing and emerging AI technologies.