Research & Projects

This project explores how cultural environments shape the way pain is experienced, regulated, communicated, and interpreted through non-verbal signals such as facial expressions. I became interested in this question after noticing that most pain studies focus on Western populations, leaving cultural variation largely unexplored. Working with colleagues at the Visual and Social Perception Lab (UQO) and partners in Canada, Asia, and Europe, we addressed this gap through systematic reviews and cross-cultural experiments.

Objectives

• To identify the stages of pain communication (experience, affective response, regulation, and facial expression) where cultural variation emerges.

• To assess whether East Asian and Western participants differ in their mental representations and perceptual strategies when decoding facial expressions of pain.

• To provide an integrative framework that bridges basic research on perception with applied perspectives in healthcare, where underestimation of pain can have critical consequences.

• To develop O-DRAAMA (Online Display Rule Adjustment and Adaptation Method), a novel approach to measure cultural display rules of pain expression.

Results in Brief

Our systematic review highlighted that cultural environments can modulate affective pain responses, with some groups reporting more intense affective pain experiences than others. While many cultures describe pain as deeply unpleasant, others may view it as meaningful or even as an opportunity for personal growth. Importantly, quantitative studies across diverse methodologies consistently demonstrate robust cultural differences in affective pain, including indicators such as unpleasantness, distress, anger, and anxiety. However, research has been disproportionately centered on U.S. populations, pointing to the urgent need for greater cultural diversity in the study of pain.

Complementing this review, our experimental work showed that East Asian and Western participants differ in their mental representations and perceptual strategies for decoding facial expressions of pain. These findings suggest that cultural display rules and perceptual strategies contribute to systematic biases, with some groups requiring more intense expressions before recognizing pain. 

Some Related Publications and Presentations 

[in prep] Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., Saumure, C., Fiset, D., Cormier, S., & Blais, C. (under review, August 1, 2025). How culture shapes the communication of pain: A systematic review on the affective component and future directions. Psychological Bulletin. 

[article] Saumure, C., Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., Fiset, D., Cormier, S., Zhang, Y., Sun, D., … & Blais, C. (2023). Differences between East Asians and Westerners in the mental representations and visual information extraction involved in the decoding of pain facial expression intensity. Affective Science, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-023-00186-1

[Conference presentation] Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., Cormier, S., Saumure, C., Fiset, D., & Blais, C. (2025). The role of culture in shaping affective responses to physical pain: Clinical insights and future research opportunities. Journal of Pain. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2025.105074    Poster PDF 

[Conference presentation] Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., Saumure, C., Samson, D., Leblanc, D., Sénécal, D., Kealey, G., Cousineau, A., Cormier, S., Fiset, D., & Blais, C. (2025). Un cadre méthodologique intégratif pour explorer l’impact de la culture sur la communication de la douleur. Journée Scientifique du Département de Psychologie de l’UQAM, Montréal. (Canada Research Chair Award in Behavioral Medicine).   Presentation (French) 

[Conference presentation] Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., Saumure, C., Fiset, D., Cormier, S., Zhang, Y., Sun, D., Feng, M., Luo, F., Kunz, M., & Blais, C. (2022). Impact of culture on expectations and decoding strategies regarding pain facial expressions intensity. Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, virtual event.   Presentation video  

[Conference presentation] Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., Saumure, C., Cormier, S., Fiset, D., Kunz, M., Sun, D., … & Blais, C. (2018). The impact of culture on the visual representation of pain facial expressions. Journal of Vision, 18(10), 1108.    Poster PDF 

This project investigates how racial profile influence the perception of others’ pain. Previous work suggests that pain is systematically underestimated in individuals of Black ethnicity, particularly in contexts where the majority population is White. Such biases may have profound consequences in clinical and everyday settings, where accurate recognition of pain is essential for adequate care and empathy. The project brings together a series of experimental studies that examine the perceptual and decision-making processes underlying these biases, with the goal of identifying the mechanisms responsible for underestimation and confusion in pain perception.

Objectives

• Test whether underestimation of pain in Black faces reflects altered perceptual sensitivity, altered decision criteria, or both.

• Compare how pain is perceived in Black versus White faces across different populations (e.g., Western and African perceivers).

• Examine whether underestimation extends to intensity judgments and how it is shaped by perceptual and representational processes.

• Investigate the overlap between pain and other negative emotions (e.g., anger, disgust, sadness) and how these confusions are influenced by racial/ethnic profiles.

• Provide empirical evidence that informs broader discussions on racial inequities in pain evaluation and treatment.

Results in Brief

Across two experimental approaches, we found consistent evidence that pain in Black faces is systematically underestimated. In detection tasks, White participants required stronger evidence before categorizing a Black face as being in pain, revealing a shifted decision criterion rather than reduced sensitivity. Using serial reproduction (“TeleFace”), perceived pain intensity in Black avatars drifted toward lower values than in White avatars, with differences of nearly 10 percentage points. Together, these findings show that biases against Black individuals in pain perception emerge both in categorical decisions (“is this pain or not?”) and in the evaluation of intensity.

In parallel, three studies examined how racial profiles interact with the confusion between pain and other negative emotions. Reverse correlation revealed that mental representations of pain differ by culture and by the ethnic profile of the face, with White face templates judged as more painful than Black ones. Moreover, White participants’ expectations of pain expressions overlapped systematically with anger, disgust, and sadness, and individual differences in these expectations were captured by distinct clusters of observers. Finally, generative modeling experiments confirmed that pain is the least accurately identified facial expression and that it is more often confused with disgust in Black than in White faces. These findings indicate that racial profiles amplify misclassification biases, and that both cultural context and individual expectations contribute to systematic confusion between pain and other emotions.

Some Related Publications and Presentations 

[in prep]  Plouffe-Demers, M-P., Chen, C., § Pérez Motta, A., Gosetti, V., Blais, C., Marin, M.-F. & Jack, R.E. (in prep) Ethnicity and Pain Recognition: Unraveling Confusion Patterns in Facial Expressions.

[in prep] M Sénécal, D., Saumure, C., Fiset, D., Plouffe-Demers, M-P., Gosselin, F. & Blais, C. (In preparation ). The Under-Detection of Pain in Black Faces Reflects a Conservative Response Bias, Not Perceptual Sensitivity.

[conference presentation]* Plouffe-Demers, M-P., Chen, C., Pérez Motta, A., Gosetti, V., Blais, C. & Jack, R.E. (2025) Is Emotion Confusion Color Blind? Affec Sci 6, 50–62 (2025) ☆ Selection high-ranking abstracts  https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-025-00297-x    Poster PDF 

[article] Gingras, F., Fiset, D., Plouffe‐Demers, M. P., Deschênes, A., Cormier, S., Forget, H., & Blais, C. (2023). Pain in the eye of the beholder: Variations in pain visual representations as a function of face ethnicity and culture. British Journal of Psychology. ☆ Guy Bégin, Best Article, SQRP https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12641

[conference presentation] * Plouffe-Demers, M-P., Plouffe, V., § Samson, D., § Leblanc, D., Sénécal, D., M Kelly, G., M Cousineau, A., Fiset, D. & Blais, C (2023) Perceptual factors underlie the estimation bias in negative emotions perception of black, white or asian faces. Society for Affective Science, Long Beach, CA, USA Poster PDF

[conference presentation] *Plouffe-Demers, M-P., Plouffe, V., Fiset, D., Cormier, S. & Blais, C. (2021). Perceptual factors underlie the underestimation bias in pain perception of black and white faces. Journal of Vision, 21(9), 2703. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.21.9.2703

According to the constructivist theory of emotion, when an affect is experienced, the brain interprets bodily sensations and external stimuli through the lens of prior knowledge and context. This perspective suggests that affective representations inherently embed contextual information, which is expected to vary across cultures. Despite this theoretical emphasis, few empirical studies have systematically captured everyday affective experiences across diverse populations.

This project addresses that gap by developing AFFECT CoNTEXT (AFFECTiveCorpus of Narrative Tales of EXperience & Topics), a large-scale, multilingual database of real-life affective scenarios. 

Objectives

• Build a large-scale, multilingual database of everyday affective scenarios across eight transnational cultural groups, spanning 47 countries.

• Collect balanced data across affective states (physical pain, anger, joy) and intensity levels (low vs. high) to model how context interacts with affect strength.

• Use topic modeling and statistical analysis to identify contextual themes and compare their distribution across cultures and intensities.

• Reveal both cultural variations and shared contexts in affective experience.

• Provide an open-access database to advance inclusive, cross-cultural research in psychology and affective science.

Results

Preliminary results revealed robust cross-cultural variation in the contexts associated with pain, anger, and joy, alongside universally shared scenarios. For example, some cultures more often linked joy to competitive success, while others emphasized family interactions; pain was universally evoked by physical injury but was sometimes framed as meaningful or necessary in certain groups. These findings demonstrate that culture shapes affective contexts, with topic modeling confirming systematic differences across regions and affective levels.

This study also introduces BERTopic as a context-sensitive approach for cross-cultural analysis, providing nuanced insights into how culture influences affective experiences. Complementary analyses using a fine-tuned BERT model showed that cultural group membership could be predicted from scenario content at rates above chance. Moreover, the tokens driving model predictions paralleled themes identified through BERTopic, highlighting a promising convergence between interpretability and predictive modeling. Together, these results suggest systematic cultural variations in affective narratives, with certain contexts holding greater salience in some cultures than in others. This variation underscores how cultural norms and values influence the conceptualization and expression of affect.

Some Related Publications and Presentations 

[proceeding submitted] Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., Winterstein, G., Laperle, S., Hosseini Saravani, S. H., Samson, D., Leblanc, D., Fiset, D., Cote, R., Zhang, Y., Waterfield, M., & Blais, C. (2026). AFFECT CoNTEXT – A multicultural database to study contextual variations in affective experience. In Proceedings of the 2026 International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2026).

[conference presentation] *Plouffe-Demers, M.-P, Winterstein, G., Saravani, SSH., Laperle, S., M Samson, D., M Leblanc, D., Fiset, D., Coté, R., Zhang, Y., Waterfield, M., & Blais, C. (2025) Mapping Emotional Contexts across Cultures: A Topic Modeling Approach to Pain, Anger, and Joy.  APS Global Psychological Science Summit (online event). 

[conference presentation] *Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., Winterstein, G., Laperle, S., Saravani, S. S. H., M Samson, D., M Leblanc, D., Fiset, D., & Blais, C. (2025). Cultural contexts of emotional experiences and pain: A topic modeling analysis. Society for Affective Science (SAS) Annual Conference, Portland, OR, United States. Poster PDF

Effective communication of pain is essential for survival, and facial expressions play a central role in this process. However, the way pain is expressed and interpreted is strongly shaped by cultural norms. Most existing studies on cultural display rules rely on self-report questionnaires, which capture beliefs but not behavior. To address this gap, I developed O-DRAAMA (Online Display Rule & Affective Appraisal Method of Adjustment), a behavioral tool designed to measure how people from diverse cultural backgrounds expect pain and other emotions to be expressed in the face.

Objectives

• Develop an online, scenario-based tool that jointly measures affective appraisal (free labeling, valence, intensity) and expected facial expressivity.

• Capture behavioral display rules by allowing participants to actively adjust facial expressions in both configuration and intensity.

• Scale the tool for large, cross-cultural comparisons across eight major cultural groups.

• Quantify cultural differences in display rules using a data-driven approach (modeling and inference from participant adjustments). Enabling the identification of emergent clusters of display rule patterns rather than relying solely on pre-imposed cultural groups.

Significance

O-DRAAMA is the first tool to move beyond questionnaires by offering a behavioral measure of display rules, capturing both affective appraisal and expressivity norms. It opens the door to systematic cross-cultural research on how pain is conceptualized and expressed, with implications for healthcare, clinical settings, and intercultural communication.

Some Related Publications and Presentations 

[conference presentation] * Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., Samson, D., Leblanc, D., Sénécal, D., Kealey, G., Cousineau, A., Fiset, D., & Blais, C. (2023, May). Cultural determinants of pain expression: Investigating cross-cultural display rules. Vision Science Society Annual Meeting, St. Pete Beach, FL, United States. PDF Poster

Facial expressions are central to social communication, allowing us to infer others’ emotions and states such as pain. However, the perceptual mechanisms that support this recognition are complex and context-dependent. This project investigates how visual information — including spatial frequency content, intensity cues, and the distinction between posed and spontaneous displays — shapes the recognition of facial expressions of both basic emotions and pain. Using psychophysical techniques such as the Bubbles method and spatial frequency filtering, these studies provide new insights into how humans extract diagnostic information from faces in ecological contexts.

Objectives

• Examine how the processing of dynamic vs. static expressions influences spatial frequency tuning.

• Identify sex differences in the discrimination of pain intensity and the underlying visual strategies.

• Compare visual information use in posed vs. spontaneous expressions, highlighting ecological validity in expression recognition.

• Determine which spatial frequency ranges are most diagnostic for categorizing basic emotions.

Results

Across four complementary studies, several key findings emerged:

Dynamic vs. static processing. Recognition of dynamic expressions showed a consistent shift toward lower spatial frequencies compared to static expressions. Interestingly, this effect was not specific to emotional motion but appeared whenever motion was present, suggesting that the visual system flexibly adapts to dynamic input by prioritizing coarser information.

Sex differences in pain discrimination. Women outperformed men in discriminating pain intensities, not because of empathic tendencies but due to their use of larger, more distributed facial regions. This advantage may reflect a more holistic or flexible integration strategy compared to men’s more rigid reliance on specific areas.

Posed vs. spontaneous expressions. Visual strategies were less systematic for spontaneous compared to posed expressions, reflecting higher heterogeneity across individuals. For posed expressions, perceivers relied more on the mouth region, while spontaneous expressions elicited a more balanced reliance on both mouth and eyes, suggesting that ecological authenticity changes how diagnostic cues are processed.

The role of mid-spatial frequencies. Facial expression categorization relied most strongly on mid-range spatial frequencies (∼6–13 cycles per face), often neglected in previous studies. These frequencies supported optimal recognition at naturalistic viewing distances (1.2–2.4 m), while performance declined sharply once they were no longer accessible. This highlights the central role of mid-range SFs in ecological facial expression recognition.

Taken together, these findings show that recognition of emotional and pain expressions depends on the interaction between stimulus properties (motion, authenticity, intensity) and observer characteristics (sex, strategy flexibility). They advance our understanding of the perceptual mechanisms that allow humans to decode complex social signals.

Some Related Publications and Presentations 

[article] Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., Saumure, C., Fiset, D., & Blais, C. (2022). Facial expression of pain: Sex differences in the discrimination of varying intensities. Emotion, 23(5), 1254–1266. ☆ Guy Bégin, Best Article Award, SQRP.

[article] Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., Fiset, D., Saumure, C., Duncan, J., & Blais, C. (2019). Strategy shift toward lower spatial frequencies in the recognition of dynamic facial expressions of basic emotions: When it moves it is different. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1563. ☆ Best Student Article, UQAM.

[article] M  Richer, A., Gingras, F., Plouffe-Demers, M-P., Fiset, D. & Blais, C. (2025) Is it pain, anger, disgust or sadness? Individual differences in expectations of pain facial expressions. Emotion https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001516

[article] Charbonneau, I., Duncan, J., Blais, C., Guérette, J., Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., Smith, F., & Fiset, D. (2025). Facial expression categorization predominantly relies on mid-spatial frequencies. Vision Research, 1–10.

[article] Saumure, C., Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., Estéphan, A., Fiset, D., & Blais, C. (2018). The use of visual information in the recognition of posed and spontaneous expressions. Journal of Vision, 18(9), 21.

[conference presentation] * Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., Saumure, C., Fiset, D., Cormier, S., Kunz, M., & Blais, C. (2019). Variation of empathy in viewers impacts facial features encoded in their mental representation of pain expression. Journal of Vision, 19(10), 156.

[conference presentation] *Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., Saumure, C., Fiset, D., & Blais, C. (2017). Spatial frequency utilization during the recognition of static, dynamic and dynamic random facial expressions. Journal of Vision, 17(10), 826. 

Facial emotional expressions (FEE) in autistic individuals are often described as atypical, which can lead to misunderstandings and inadequate recognition of their emotional needs. Unlike most studies that constrain expression through artificial tasks, this project used the Montreal Stimulating Play Situation (MSPS), a naturalistic, play-based setting. Human coding of these interactions previously identified emotional expressions that did not fit standard categories and were labeled as “unknown.” This project applied automated methods to characterize these atypical FEEs.

Objectives

• Pair an automatic action unit extraction system with data-driven exploratory analyses.

• Describe systematic facial patterns (combinations of action units/facial movements) characterizing FEEs in autistic vs. typically developing children.

• Compare the occurrence of these FEEs between groups to identify both differences and overlaps.

Results

Using automated facial coding (OpenFace) and clustering analyses on naturalistic play sessions, we identified 13 distinct expression clusters across autistic and typically developing children. Seven clusters were significantly group-specific. Autistic children tended to produce more intense expressions, including one atypical pattern marked by unusual co-activation of multiple action units (e.g., brow furrowing, nose wrinkling, mouth corner stretching). This expression, consistently detected across analyses, may reflect a mixed or ambivalent emotional state. Overall, the findings highlight both quantitative (greater intensity) and qualitative (atypical AU combinations) differences in autistic children’s facial expressions, offering new insight into how emotional communication unfolds in natural contexts.

Some Related Publications and Presentations 

[conference presentation] Plouffe-Demers, M.-P., § Lacelle, C., Blais, C., Soulières, I., & Jacques, C. (2015, March). Expressions faciales d’enfants autistes et typiques en contexte de jeu : que révèle la détection automatique ? In C. Blais & A. Roy-Charland (Co-Chairs), Facteurs biologiques et sociaux dans l’encodage et le décodage des expressions faciales affectives [Symposium]. Société québécoise pour la recherche en psychologie, Saint-Sauveur, QC, Canada.

Public trust in science has been eroding in many places, even as decisions in health, education, policing, and justice rely on scientific evidence. This project bridges that gap by translating evidence-based findings into practical guidance for frontline professionals. Beyond “racism” as a label, we focus on how visual perception can bias our judgments and behavior—and how multiple social factors (cultural environment, prior knowledge, family learning, ethnic/racial identification, past exposure) shape what we see and how we act. Our goal is to make robust research accessible, actionable, and relevant for real-world decisions.

Objectives

• Inform professionals about advances in cultural psychology and their implications for practice, grounded in evidence-based findings.

• Explain perceptual mechanisms (e.g., how context, cultural norms, and visual “diet” bias interpretations of pain and emotion).

• Equip teams with tools (checklists, scenarios, de-biasing strategies) they can apply immediately in interviews, triage, de-escalation, and decision-making.

• Co-develop and tailor trainings with communities and institutions to ensure cultural relevance and feasibility.

• Evaluate impact (knowledge, attitudes, behavior) to improve modules over time.

Some Related Publications and Presentations 

[article] Blais C., Fiset, D., Gingras F., Plouffe-Demers, M-P, & Charbonneau, I. (2024) Diversity in visual perception research: how cultural variability in face processing can inform policymakers. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1177/23727322241269039

[book chapter] Plouffe-Demers, M-P., Desjardins, M-C., Saumure, C. Blais, C. (2022). Les biais culturels et ethniques dans la communication non verbale des émotions : Implications pour la prestation des services publics. Dans V. Denault (Dir.), La science au service de la pratique : enquêtes, procès et justice, Volume 2 (p. 115-138). Éditions Yvon Blais.