Bio 

Hello! I am Marie-Pier Plouffe-Demers, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Université du Québec à Montréal, working under the supervision of Professors Caroline Blais and Daniel Fiset at Visual and Social Perception Lab.

My research sits at the intersection of affective and cognitive sciences, social and cultural psychology, and the study of pain. I examine how perceptual and cultural factors shape the conception, experience, expression, and recognition of affective states such as pain, joy, and anger. Broadly, I am interested in the processes through which these states are communicated.

During my doctoral work, I led cross-cultural projects in eight world regions, collaborated internationally on studies of face perception and emotion inference, and completed research internships at the FaceSyntax Lab (University of Glasgow), at LUDICA (Rivière-des-Prairies Hospital in Montreal), the SLIC lab (UQAM’s linguistics department) and at the Center of Cognition and Brain Disorders (Hangzhou Normal University, China). 

In January 2026, I will begin a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University’s Affective Science and Culture Lab with Prof. Maria Gendron, where I will extend this work by examining how people integrate facial and contextual cues when interpreting emotions, and how features such as ambiguity and intensity shape perception and behavior.

"Across these projects, I have used psychophysical methods, automated facial analysis, and natural language processing to tackle questions about emotion communication in both lab and real-world contexts."

Beyond research, I am passionate about science communication. One of my most meaningful experiences in this area was serving as a student representative for the SQRP, where I designed and coordinated Éclair de Psy, a provincial science communication competition that invited students to present their research through innovative formats such as podcasts and videos. More recently, together with colleagues at the Visual and Social Perception Lab, I co-developed Culture Générale — a series of public training sessions for service providers (e.g., healthcare, law enforcement, education). These sessions are designed to raise awareness of advances in cultural psychology and their implications for practice, with a strong emphasis on evidence-based approaches.