Question: Why did you become so interested in science? Was there anyone in your family who had these simillar problems?

Alice Jones Bartoli answered on 14 Jun 2011:

Hi Trudi,

My family are all fairly well behaved, but I have always been interested in working with people who have special problems. One of the things that motivates me to study children with these sorts of problems is the risk that they are at of social and educational exclusion. There were children at my school who weren’t always allowed to take part in classroom activities because they were ‘naughty’, and I always found that to be at odds with what school should be about.

Children who don’t behave appropriately are often excluded from school, so they miss out on opportunities to make friends, learn the curriculum and have the sorts of opportunities that other children have. Many people think that it’s important to punish bad behaviour, but I’m really not so certain.

The first question that I really, really wanted to ask about children with behavioural problems was did they really understand other people’s thoughts and feelings properly? There is some brilliant work by some psychologists at Duke University in North Carolina that suggest that some children with behavioural problems have a skewed world view – they think that accidents are really negative things done against them, and so they respond aggressively. This shaped the work that I wanted to do, and started me off on a trail of research that I followed through my PhD and afterwards.

You can see from the different types of scientists taking part in this that there are many different areas that you could be interested in; we definitely don’t know a huge amount about each others’ work. The thing for me was to find the area that I was interested in, and to follow it.