Dr Leach is a Lecturer in Social Psychology at Lancaster University. His expertise lies in social and moral psychology, as well as computational methods and natural language processing.

His doctoral research investigated differences in how powerful and powerless people experience and express positive and negative affect. During his postdoctoral research Dr Leach investigated the possibility that people may strategically forget information that is incongruent with their behaviour or world-view, and how such processes may shape human-animal relations (e.g., beliefs regarding animal sentience).

• Leach, S. & Dhont, K. (2023). Non-speciesist language conveys moral commitments to animals and evokes do-gooder derogation. Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations, 2, e9869
• Leach, S., Sutton, R., Douglas, K., & Dhont, K. (2021). The ‘me’ in meat: Does affirming the self make eating animals seem more morally wrong? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 95. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104135
• Leach, S., Sutton, R. M., Dhont, K., & Douglas, K. M. (2021). When is it wrong to eat animals? The relevance of different animal traits and behaviours. European Journal of Social Psychology, 51, 113-123. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2718
• Leach, S., & Weick, M. (2018). From grumpy to cheerful (and back): How power impacts mood in and across different contexts. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 79, 107-114. doi: 10.1016/j.jesp.2018.05.004
• Leach, S., & Weick, M. (2017). Can people judge the veracity of their intuitions?. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9, 40-49. doi: 10.1177/1948550617706732