Hi there,

As a social species, we constantly exchange affective information. These exchanges help us coordinate, support one another, build trust, and make decisions — sometimes with real consequences for health, safety, and equity. When affective communication breaks down, the costs can be substantial.

Research program

Axis 1 — Affective communication as a process

• How do affective states travel from one mind to another?

• Production / expression: What do people choose to show through words, faces, and gestures?

• Perception / inference: What do observers extract, prioritize, and interpret from that signal?

• Consequences: How do these inferences shape decisions and behavior (e.g., support, trust, healthcare judgments)?

Axis 2 — What shapes the process

• Which social and cultural forces reshape the meaning of the same signal?

• Situation: ambiguity, incongruence, intentionality, perceived control, people involved

• Culture: social norms and “unwritten rules” around expressivity, language, geography

• Social biases: how race- and gender-related stereotypes influence what we think we see and believe

• Together, these axes address a core question: What we transmit — and what we use — to understand others, and under which conditions?

Across my projects, I combine psychophysical methods, automated facial analysis, and natural language processing to study emotion communication in both controlled laboratory settings and more ecologically valid, real-world contexts.

Before Yale, I completed my PhD in Psychology at Université du Québec à Montréal (supervised by Profs. Caroline Blais and Daniel Fiset), where I led cross-cultural projects across eight world regions to examine cultural variation in pain communication. 

I also collaborated internationally on studies of face perception and emotion inference, and completed research internships at the FaceSyntax Lab (University of Glasgow), LUDICA (Rivière-des-Prairies Hospital, Montreal), the SLIC lab (UQAM Linguistics), and the Center of Cognition and Brain Disorders (Hangzhou Normal University, China).

At Yale’s Affective Science and Culture Lab (Prof. Maria Gendron), I examine how people integrate facial and contextual cues when interpreting emotions, with a focus on how signal features such as ambiguity and intensity shape cue weighting and influence behavior.