Joyce Humphries

Joyce Humphries serves as Associate Head of Department in the Psychology Department. Her research focuses on cognitive and forensic psychology, with particular expertise in eyewitness identification, alcohol effects on memory, and age-related differences in perception and judgment.

Dr. Humphries' research program centers on several interconnected domains. Her work extensively investigates how alcohol intoxication affects eyewitness memory accuracy and confidence-accuracy relationships in identification tasks. She has made significant contributions to understanding the cross-age deficit in eyewitness identification performance, particularly examining whether cross-age contact can mitigate these age-related differences. Another major strand of her research examines spontaneous trait judgments from facial appearance, with special focus on trustworthiness assessments across different age groups. Her fingerprint analysis reveals strong engagement with topics including Alcohol (100%), Older Adults (100%), Alcohol Effects (66%), Rape Psychology (66%), Reaction Time (66%), Tonic Water (60%), Age Groups (56%), and Trustworthiness (50%).

Analysis of Dr. Humphries' publication trajectory shows a consistent focus on forensic applications of cognitive psychology, with recent expansion into personality factors related to offending behavior. Her work demonstrates increasing sophistication in examining multiple variables simultaneously (alcohol, age, and contextual factors) in eyewitness identification scenarios. The systematic review published in 2025 represents a broadening of her research scope while maintaining connections to her foundational work in cognition and memory.

Joyce Humphries has supervised research work as indicated by the 'Supervised Work (2)' notation in her profile. Her collaborative research network includes prominent scholars such as H.D. Flowe, M.F. Colloff, and H. Ryder, with whom she has co-authored multiple publications. Her research has attracted significant attention, with several papers accumulating dozens of citations and policy impacts, including one policy citation for her 2017 alcohol intoxication and lineup identification study.