Hi there,

I’m Marie-Pier Plouffe-Demers, a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University. 

My work centers on a simple idea: 

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 this communication breaks down, the costs can be substantial.

At the intersection of affective, cognitive and vision science, social and cultural psychology, and pain research, my program asks 

• What we transmit - and what we use - to understand others?

• What information travels through our words, faces, and gestures? 

• Which cues are most informative, and when do they matter most? 

• How does context (the situation, environment, relationship dynamics, and social norms) reshape the meaning of the very same signal? 

• How do culture and the “unwritten rules” we learn over time guide both expression and interpretation? 

• And how do social biases influence what we think we see in a face?

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.