Our research
The Social Cognition Lab team researches how people perceive, evaluate, understand, and evaluate others through multiple lenses and methods. The lab has access to a 3T MRI scanner, an in-lab eye-tracker, and a database of community-dwelling older adults.
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Here are a few of the lab's current research areas.
Understanding mental states and resulting impressions
Decoding people’s mental states via their facial emotions facilitates social interactions because it enables the prediction of intentions. Some emotions are more complex (e.g., suspicious) than others (e.g., anger). Given their contribution to navigating complex social environments and humanization, much work has sought to identify mechanisms for complex emotion decoding from faces or specific features such as eye regions. Most work has focused on top-down factors affecting this decoding (e.g., cultural differences). Our work focuses on bottom-up perceptual factors. This focus is important because although top-down factors might be more obvious targets for interventions, these interventions may be ineffective if bottom-up perceptual factors are not also acknowledged.
Characterizing how facial cues bias trait impressions and outcomes
Facial cues pervade impressions. People reliably form negative impressions, for example, of untrustworthy faces. They also activate categorical stereotypes that polarize impressions. Negative racial stereotypes, for example, exacerbate untrustworthiness impressions (Cassidy et al., 2017; Cassidy & Krendl, 2016). Contributions of these facial cues to impressions have largely been studied in isolation even though impression formation is dynamic and integrative. Characterizing impressions formed from combinations of cues can inform our understanding of how biased impressions emerge and affect target outcomes. To this end, we research how information paired with (e.g., behaviors) or intrinsic to (e.g., facial characteristics and categories) faces affect impressions and their consequences.
Leveraging lifespan changes to inform our understanding of biased impressions
Our work shows that not everyone thinks about and processes faces in the same way (Cassidy, Harding, et al., 2019; Cassidy, Hughes, et al., 2022; Cassidy & Krendl, 2019; Cassidy & Liebenow, 2021). One way this differential processing may emerge is through motivation to process certain cues over others. Comparing impressions across age offers an excellent way to address this possibility. Unlike non-social domains, social perception is fairly stable with age. Older and younger adults differ, however, in their motivation to process cues contributing to impressions. Whereas older adults focus on more positive than negative cues, this difference does not emerge among younger adults. Examining impression valence in different contexts (e.g., intergroup contexts) allows us to better elucidate mechanisms underlying person perception.
Understanding mental states and resulting impressions
Decoding people’s mental states via their facial emotions facilitates social interactions because it enables the prediction of intentions. Some emotions are more complex (e.g., suspicious) than others (e.g., anger). Given their contribution to navigating complex social environments and their link to humanization, much work has sought to identify mechanisms for complex emotion decoding from faces or specific features such as eye regions. Most work has focused on top-down factors affecting this decoding (e.g., cultural differences). Our work focuses on bottom-up perceptual factors. This focus is important because although top-down factors might be more obvious targets for interventions, these interventions may be ineffective if bottom-up perceptual factors are not also acknowledged.
Characterizing how facial cues bias trait impressions and outcomes
Facial cues pervade impressions. People reliably form negative impressions, for example, of untrustworthy faces. They also activate categorical stereotypes that polarize impressions. Negative racial stereotypes, for example, exacerbate untrustworthiness impressions (Cassidy et al., 2017; Cassidy & Krendl, 2016). Contributions of these facial cues to impressions have largely been studied in isolation even though impression formation is dynamic and integrative. Characterizing impressions formed from combinations of cues can inform our understanding of how biased impressions emerge and affect target outcomes. To this end, we research how information paired with (e.g., behaviors) or intrinsic to (e.g., facial characteristics and categories) faces affect impressions and their consequences.
Leveraging lifespan changes to inform our understanding of biased impressions
Our work shows that not everyone thinks about and processes faces in the same way (Cassidy, Harding, et al., 2019; Cassidy, Hughes, et al., 2022; Cassidy & Krendl, 2019; Cassidy & Liebenow, 2021). One way this differential processing may emerge is through motivation to process certain cues over others. Comparing impressions across age offers an excellent way to address this possibility. Unlike non-social domains, social perception is fairly stable with age. Older and younger adults differ, however, in their motivation to process cues contributing to impressions. Whereas older adults focus on more positive than negative cues, this difference does not emerge among younger adults. Examining how these differences elicit age differences in impressions in different contexts (e.g., intergroup contexts) can elucidate mechanis underlying person perception.
Dr. Cassidy's research word cloud!
