Maria Gendron, Ph.D.

Maria Gendron's picture
Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Ph.D. 2013, Boston College

Emotions sit at an important nexus in psychological science: they color our experiences of the world, drive our behavior, are critical for human bonding and relationships, and impact health and wellbeing. Yet emotions manifest in widely different forms across cultures, contexts, and individuals. My lab focuses on describing and unpacking these sources of diversity. Ongoing work focuses on the dynamic influences of social, cognitive and cultural processes on emotional experience and perception. This research program is motivated by the proposal that emotional phenomena emerge from multiple, interacting, domain-general systems, including the functioning of the conceptual/semantic system. We adopt a multidisciplinary approach, drawing core concepts from social- cultural psychology and affective neuroscience, using methods ranging from standard laboratory experiments, ambulatory data collection that bridges world and lab, and cross-cultural fieldwork.