Shihui Yu

Profile

I completed the MSc Psychological Approaches to Health at the University of Leeds. Currently I am undertaking a Ph.D. and working as a teaching assistant in the School of Psychology. My Ph.D. project focuses on infant feeding, responsive feeding, satiety/satiation responsiveness, and alexithymia. Both my master and my Ph.D. are supervised by Professor Marion Hetherington. 

As a PGR rep and a member of the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Committee in the School of Psychology, my interests lie not only in doing research but also in bringing PGRs together within our school, to create a sense of community where we call home.

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Research interests

My master's project focused on the satiation process in which we explored the association between eating cessation (measured by the Reasons Individuals Stop Eating Questionnaire, AKA “RISE-Q”) and other eating traits including Satiety Responsiveness (AEBQ), mindful eating traits, and interoception.

My Ph.D. project aims to explore the impact of the “baby translator” on the improvement of maternal responsiveness towards infant appetite cues. We have validated the shorter version of RISE-Q which is named RISE-Q15 (Chawner et al., 2022). In addition, we found that caregiver’s ability to “tune-in” to their own internal satiation cues inversely mediated the relationship between caregivers’s alexithymia and their awareness of infant hunger and satiety cues during feeding (Yu et al., 2024). That is, the better a caregiver is at detecting and responding to their hunger and full cues, the weaker the negative impact of alexithymia on their ability to read their children's appetite cues during mealtimes. The last study in this PhD project involved a follow-up qualitative study on mealtime experiences with parents scoring high on alexithymia (measured by the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale). We had one-to-one semi-structured, video-elicited interviews with 14 parents (2 fathers, 12 mothers) of children aged 18-36m. The conversation involved their mealtime interactions, struggles in feeding their children, their coping strategies, as well as how they have adapted their feeding practices as their children developed. Preliminary results were presented during the 49th British Feeding and Drinking Group Annual Meeting on April 25th, 2025.

Research interests:

• Human appetite
• Satiation/satiety
• Infant feeding
• Responsive feeding
• Parental sensitivity
• Mindful eating
• Interoceptive awareness
• Intuitive eating
• Childhood obesity
• Alexithymia

Qualifications

• M.Sc. Psychological Approaches to Health (Merit)
• B.Sc. Applied Psychology (Hons)
• B.A Journalism (Hons, secondary degree)