My research interests lie in the domain of emotion and facial expression. Much of my work is concerned with the empirical investigation of the socio-cognitive and affective processes in human perception and behaviour. This includes research on the movement dynamics including morphological features and their role in emotion interpretation. More recently, I started to explore commonalities and differences in human and machine classification, with a particular focus on the methodological aspects in emotion expression elicitation. Other research interests relate to the general area of social perception and attribution, particularly social psychological aspects of face perception and various factors that moderate people’s judgements. These concern (a) attributes of the stimulus target such as the type of expression, the ethnicity of the face, and the presence of contextual cues, as well as (b) attributes of the perceiver such as empathic ability, stereotypes, and racial bias.

Research carried out in my laboratory focuses on the following topics:

Emotion & facial expressions
Deception detection
Uncanny valley
Mimicry
Empathy
Stereotypes
Intergroup discrimination
Dehumanization