Silke Paulmann studied English Linguistics, American Literature and Media at the Universities of Paderborn, Germany, and Groningen, The Netherlands. In 2003, she completed a Masters degree at the University of Paderborn. For the next three years she worked on her PhD thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. She obtained her PhD in Cognitive Sciences from the University of Potsdam in 2006 (Thesis title: Electrophysiological Evidence on the Processing of Emotional Prosody: Insights from Healthy and Patient Populations). Silke then held a position at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig as a postdoctoral research fellow and, in 2007, received a postdoctoral reseearch fellowship award by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). This allowed her to join the Neuropragmatics and Emotion Lab at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. In September 2009, she joined the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex.