Wendy Berry Mendes, PhD

Wendy Berry Mendes is a social, affective psychophysiologist, and her research focuses on how the brain and body respond to emotion and stress using a variety of methods, including autonomic physiology, neuroendocrinology, and immunology. She applies this methodological approach to research areas such as racial health disparities, stereotyping and prejudice, emotion and decision-making, and dyadic and group physiological synchrony. Her research approach includes lab, field, and app-based studies. In one app-based research study called MyBPLab, she leveraged an optic sensor embedded in phones and wearables to estimate blood pressure responses. The study enrolled more than 250,000 people from over 100 countries, and participants tracked their stress, emotion, and blood pressure in their daily lives, providing more than 5 million check-ins.

behavioral testing ;  biomarkers ;  brain stimulation ;  electroencephalography ;  electrophysiology ;  epidemiology ;  wearable devices  

aging ;  cognition ;  decision-making ;  emotion ;  interoception ;  motivation ;  physiology ;  stress  

Mendes is the Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Psychology at Yale University. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from UC Santa Barbara in 2003 and completed a postdoc at UCSF in Psychology and Medicine. After faculty positions at Harvard and UCSF Medical School, she joined the Yale Psychology faculty in 2023. In addition to loving all things related to social psychology, affective science, and psychophysiology, she is obsessed with movies by Tarantino, von Trier, and Aster, the TV show Severance, and the Lakers (but not seasons 2013-2019).