Mechanisms of emotion understanding across contexts and cultures
Emotions are ubiquitous, but there is wide variation in how precisely people infer what others feel. The Affective Science and Culture Lab studies emotion inference as it unfolds in dynamic, real-world social episodes. Using a combination of lab, ambulatory, and cross-cultural approaches—integrating behavior, physiology, and computational modeling—we identify the mechanisms that shape these judgments over time and across contexts. Building a comprehensive account of these mechanisms can inform interventions to improve emotion understanding and guide the responsible development and evaluation of technologies that aim to model human emotion inference.
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Biography
Maria Gendron is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University and directs the Affective Science and Culture Lab. She earned her PhD (and earlier MA and BA) in Social Psychology from Boston College and completed postdoctoral training at Northeastern University. She joined Yale in 2018. Outside the lab, she makes pottery and hikes with her dogs.