Mircea Zloteanu is a Lecturer in Psychology and Criminology (Education) at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London.  

He joined King's in 2025, working on the Psychology and Criminology undergraduate course, with a focus on Research Methods and Statistics. He received his PhD in Experimental Psychology from University College London. Prior to joining King's, he has worked for UCL, Teesside University, and Kingston University.

Mircea is an experimental psychology researcher interested in emotions, decision-making, user behaviour in the Sharing Economy, and deception detection. His research focuses on the behavioural cues used to ascertain if people are being truthful or deceptive.

Mircea's work involves investigating differences in judgements and perceptions made alone or in groups, embodied effects on attention and information processing, the impact of situational factors on accuracy and bias, the production of deceptive facial expressions, and improving forensic interviewing practices.

Recent interests have been on meta-research and meta-psychology, with a focus on methods, statistics, and open science.

Mircea is a Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is also the UK Reproducibility Network Local Co-Lead, and member of the ReproducibiliTea network.

Research interests

• deception detection (veracity judgements)
• facial expressions of emotions
• user decision-making
• nonverbal behaviour
• Signal Detection Theory
• investigative interviewing
• improving research methods and statistics teaching in psychology

Teaching

Mircea is the Research Methods coordinator for the Psychology and Criminology undergraduate course, leading Researching Psychology and Criminology 1 and 2, as well as the Year 2 and Final Year modules. He is also a personal tutor and supervisor for final year projects.

Expertise and public engagement

Mircea has expertise in discussing the misconceptions and misinformation around deception detection and "body language" training, focusing on science and evidence-based approaches to nonverbal behaviour.

He also speaks on matters of rigorous methodology in social science, the need for transparency and reproducibility, and improved statistical approaches and communication.