Maria Gendron
Biographic Data
| ID | 3863409 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maria Gendron |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maria |
| FAMILY NAME | Gendron |
| SIGNATURE | GENDRON M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1845-6722 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Why Internal Representations and Their Temporal Dependence Matter for Emotion Inference
Inferences about others’ emotions have largely examined judgments from static presentation of cues (e.g., facial “expressions”), ignoring temporally dynamic and integrative aspects. Here, we extend insights from predictive processing accounts, focusing on the hypothesis of temporal dependence , to review the current evidence and advance the investigation of the contextual and dynamic nature of emotion inferences. Consistent with constructionist v…
The Theory of Constructed Emotion: More Than a Feeling
A recently published article by van Heijst et al. attempted to reconcile two research approaches in the science of emotion—basic emotion theory and the theory of constructed emotion—by suggesting that the former explains emotions as bioregulatory states of the body whereas the latter explains feelings that arise from those state changes. This bifurcation of emotion into objective physical states and subjective feelings involves three misleading s…
Affective abstraction predicts variation in alexithymia, depression, and autism spectrum quotient
Affective abstraction refers to how people conceptualize affective states in terms of category-level representations that generalize across specific situations (e.g., "fear" as evoked by heights, predators, and haunted houses). Here, we develop a novel task for assessing affective abstraction and test its relations with trait alexithymia, depression, and autism spectrum quotient. In a preregistered online study, participants completed a set of ta…
Emotion Granularity, Regulation, and Their Implications in Health: Broadening the Scope from a Cultural and Developmental Perspective
The ability to represent emotional experiences in a precise fashion with language, termed emotional granularity, is related to a number of beneficial outcomes. However, the emotion granularity construct and operationalization are rooted in the lens of so-called Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies that focus on emotions as a mental-state phenomena. Using evidence from multiple non-WEIRD societies, we illustrate…
What We Can Learn About Emotion by Talking With the Hadza
Emotions are often thought of as internal mental states centering on individuals’ subjective feelings and evaluations. This understanding is consistent with studies of emotion narratives, or the descriptions people give for experienced events that they regard as emotions. Yet these studies, and contemporary psychology more generally, often rely on observations of educated Europeans and European Americans, constraining psychological theory and met…
Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility
Introducing a Face Sort Paradigm to Evaluate Age Differences in Emotion Perception
These findings partially support the hypothesis that older adults' concepts for emotions and emotional expressions are more complex than those of young adults, demonstrate the utility of incorporating less constrained experimental methods into the investigation of age-related differences in emotion perception, and are consistent with existing evidence of increased cognitive and emotional complexity in adulthood
A Role for Emotional Granularity in Judging
Emotions are traditionally viewed as detrimental to judicial responsibility, a belief rooted in the classical view of the mind as a battle ground between reason and emotion. Drawing on recent developments in psychology and neuroscience we propose that the brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide actions and give sensations meaning, constructing experiences such as “fear” or “anger”. Wisdom comes from skill at constructing emoti…
Context facilitates performance on a classic cross-cultural emotion perception task
The majority of studies designed to assess cross-cultural emotion perception use a choice-from-array task in which participants are presented with brief emotion stories and asked to choose between target and foil cues. This task has been widely criticized, evoking a lively and prolonged debate about whether it inadvertently helps participants to perform better than they otherwise would, resulting in the appearance of universality. In 3 studies, w…
Emotion words: Adding face value
Despite a growing number of studies suggesting that emotion words affect perceptual judgments of emotional stimuli, little is known about how emotion words affect perceptual memory for emotional faces. In Experiments 1 and 2 we tested how emotion words (compared with control words) affected participants' abilities to select a target emotional face from among distractor faces. Participants were generally more likely to false alarm to distractor em…
Emotion perception, but not affect perception, is impaired with semantic memory loss
For decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have hypothesized that the ability to perceive emotions on others' faces is inborn, prelinguistic, and universal. Concept knowledge about emotion has been assumed to be epiphenomenal to emotion perception. In this article, we report findings from 3 patients with semantic dementia that cannot be explained by this "basic emotion" view. These patients, who have substantial deficits in semantic processin…
Perceptions of emotion from facial expressions are not culturally universal: Evidence from a remote culture
It is widely believed that certain emotions are universally recognized in facial expressions. Recent evidence indicates that Western perceptions (e.g., scowls as anger) depend on cues to U.S. emotion concepts embedded in experiments. Because such cues are standard features in methods used in cross-cultural experiments, we hypothesized that evidence of universality depends on this conceptual context. In our study, participants from the United Stat…
Do people essentialize emotions? Individual differences in emotion essentialism and emotional experience
Many scientific models of emotion assume that emotion categories are natural kinds that carve nature at its joints. These beliefs remain strong, despite the fact that the empirical record on the issue has remained equivocal for over a century. In this research, the authors examined one reason for this situation: People essentialize emotion categories by assuming that members of the same category (e.g., fear) have a shared metaphysical essence (i.…
Emotion words shape emotion percepts
People believe they see emotion written on the faces of other people. In an instant, simple facial actions are transformed into information about another's emotional state. The present research examined whether a perceiver unknowingly contributes to emotion perception with emotion word knowledge. We present 2 studies that together support a role for emotion concepts in the formation of visual percepts of emotion. As predicted, we found that perce…
Context in Emotion Perception
We review recent work demonstrating consistent context effects during emotion perception. Visual scenes, voices, bodies, other faces, cultural orientation, and even words shape how emotion is perceived in a face, calling into question the still-common assumption that the emotional state of a person is written on and can be read from the face like words on a page. Incorporating context during emotion perception appears to be routine, efficient, an…
Language as context for the perception of emotion
Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility
Introducing a Face Sort Paradigm to Evaluate Age Differences in Emotion Perception
These findings partially support the hypothesis that older adults' concepts for emotions and emotional expressions are more complex than those of young adults, demonstrate the utility of incorporating less constrained experimental methods into the investigation of age-related differences in emotion perception, and are consistent with existing evidence of increased cognitive and emotional complexity in adulthood
Language as context for the perception of emotion
Context in Emotion Perception
We review recent work demonstrating consistent context effects during emotion perception. Visual scenes, voices, bodies, other faces, cultural orientation, and even words shape how emotion is perceived in a face, calling into question the still-common assumption that the emotional state of a person is written on and can be read from the face like words on a page. Incorporating context during emotion perception appears to be routine, efficient, an…
Emotion words shape emotion percepts
People believe they see emotion written on the faces of other people. In an instant, simple facial actions are transformed into information about another's emotional state. The present research examined whether a perceiver unknowingly contributes to emotion perception with emotion word knowledge. We present 2 studies that together support a role for emotion concepts in the formation of visual percepts of emotion. As predicted, we found that perce…
Do people essentialize emotions? Individual differences in emotion essentialism and emotional experience
Many scientific models of emotion assume that emotion categories are natural kinds that carve nature at its joints. These beliefs remain strong, despite the fact that the empirical record on the issue has remained equivocal for over a century. In this research, the authors examined one reason for this situation: People essentialize emotion categories by assuming that members of the same category (e.g., fear) have a shared metaphysical essence (i.…
Emotion perception, but not affect perception, is impaired with semantic memory loss
For decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have hypothesized that the ability to perceive emotions on others' faces is inborn, prelinguistic, and universal. Concept knowledge about emotion has been assumed to be epiphenomenal to emotion perception. In this article, we report findings from 3 patients with semantic dementia that cannot be explained by this "basic emotion" view. These patients, who have substantial deficits in semantic processin…
Perceptions of emotion from facial expressions are not culturally universal: Evidence from a remote culture
It is widely believed that certain emotions are universally recognized in facial expressions. Recent evidence indicates that Western perceptions (e.g., scowls as anger) depend on cues to U.S. emotion concepts embedded in experiments. Because such cues are standard features in methods used in cross-cultural experiments, we hypothesized that evidence of universality depends on this conceptual context. In our study, participants from the United Stat…
Emotion words: Adding face value
Despite a growing number of studies suggesting that emotion words affect perceptual judgments of emotional stimuli, little is known about how emotion words affect perceptual memory for emotional faces. In Experiments 1 and 2 we tested how emotion words (compared with control words) affected participants' abilities to select a target emotional face from among distractor faces. Participants were generally more likely to false alarm to distractor em…
Context facilitates performance on a classic cross-cultural emotion perception task
The majority of studies designed to assess cross-cultural emotion perception use a choice-from-array task in which participants are presented with brief emotion stories and asked to choose between target and foil cues. This task has been widely criticized, evoking a lively and prolonged debate about whether it inadvertently helps participants to perform better than they otherwise would, resulting in the appearance of universality. In 3 studies, w…
A Role for Emotional Granularity in Judging
Emotions are traditionally viewed as detrimental to judicial responsibility, a belief rooted in the classical view of the mind as a battle ground between reason and emotion. Drawing on recent developments in psychology and neuroscience we propose that the brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide actions and give sensations meaning, constructing experiences such as “fear” or “anger”. Wisdom comes from skill at constructing emoti…
Introducing a Face Sort Paradigm to Evaluate Age Differences in Emotion Perception
These findings partially support the hypothesis that older adults' concepts for emotions and emotional expressions are more complex than those of young adults, demonstrate the utility of incorporating less constrained experimental methods into the investigation of age-related differences in emotion perception, and are consistent with existing evidence of increased cognitive and emotional complexity in adulthood
Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility
Emotion Granularity, Regulation, and Their Implications in Health: Broadening the Scope from a Cultural and Developmental Perspective
The ability to represent emotional experiences in a precise fashion with language, termed emotional granularity, is related to a number of beneficial outcomes. However, the emotion granularity construct and operationalization are rooted in the lens of so-called Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies that focus on emotions as a mental-state phenomena. Using evidence from multiple non-WEIRD societies, we illustrate…
What We Can Learn About Emotion by Talking With the Hadza
Emotions are often thought of as internal mental states centering on individuals’ subjective feelings and evaluations. This understanding is consistent with studies of emotion narratives, or the descriptions people give for experienced events that they regard as emotions. Yet these studies, and contemporary psychology more generally, often rely on observations of educated Europeans and European Americans, constraining psychological theory and met…
The Theory of Constructed Emotion: More Than a Feeling
A recently published article by van Heijst et al. attempted to reconcile two research approaches in the science of emotion—basic emotion theory and the theory of constructed emotion—by suggesting that the former explains emotions as bioregulatory states of the body whereas the latter explains feelings that arise from those state changes. This bifurcation of emotion into objective physical states and subjective feelings involves three misleading s…
Affective abstraction predicts variation in alexithymia, depression, and autism spectrum quotient
Affective abstraction refers to how people conceptualize affective states in terms of category-level representations that generalize across specific situations (e.g., "fear" as evoked by heights, predators, and haunted houses). Here, we develop a novel task for assessing affective abstraction and test its relations with trait alexithymia, depression, and autism spectrum quotient. In a preregistered online study, participants completed a set of ta…
Why Internal Representations and Their Temporal Dependence Matter for Emotion Inference
Inferences about others’ emotions have largely examined judgments from static presentation of cues (e.g., facial “expressions”), ignoring temporally dynamic and integrative aspects. Here, we extend insights from predictive processing accounts, focusing on the hypothesis of temporal dependence , to review the current evidence and advance the investigation of the contextual and dynamic nature of emotion inferences. Consistent with constructionist v…
Psychology (15 works) · Cognitive psychology (13 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Perception (8 works) · Emotion classification (7 works) · Emotions and Moral Behavior (7 works) · Communication (6 works) · Emotion Perception (6 works) · Face perception (6 works) · Face Recognition and Perception (6 works)