Maria Gendron
Assistant professor of psychology
yale university
My research aims to discover the ways in which emotions function through the lens of diversity-- how do emotions vary across cultures, individuals and even, situations. At the crux of this question is the role that our knowledge and language for emotions play in creating our experiences. This research is part of a tradition of psychological construction in affective science. These approaches focus on how domain general mechanisms (such as the conceptual system) contribute to a range of phenomena, including emotions.
Research Line |01 Individual Diversity
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People vary in their emotional expertise. We are interested in the nature of this expertise and how it exerts an influence on everyday emotional experiences, wellbeing, and inferences of others.
In one line of research, we find that individual differences in verbal complexity and conceptual knowledge (what people know about emotions) are associated with skill in identifying changes in others' emotions.
We are increasingly interested in how individual differences in emotional processes are reflected in established dyads, including romantic couples.
Research Line |01 Cultural Diversity
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In this line of work, I investigate cultural diversity in the way that emotions are perceived and experienced. Some of my early research involved field work in small-scale societies (Himba pastoralist society in Namibia and Hadza hunter-gatherer society in Tanzania). This research revealed considerable variation in meaning-making about Western style expressions of emotion (in the face and voice), with a relative emphasis on action and situation in these societies compared to Americans. See Media Coverage
Ongoing research leverages behavioral studies across large-scale industrialized societies to examine cultural variation in representational structure of emotion.
Research Line |03 Situational Diversity
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This line of work investigates "situational" diversity in emotion. That is, what are the drivers of moment-to-moment diversity in how emotions are perceived and expressed. In one line of work, we investigate how perceivers weigh situational context and when they update inferences of emotion in others based on unfolding information.
In another line of work, we examine how the functions of different types of lay relationships serve to shape which emotions are viewed as connecting and thus expressed and perceived more within those relational contexts.
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