My research interests are in the areas of social, developmental, and
evolutionary psychology. Particularly, I am interested in the
evolutionary pressures that have influenced human and non-human primate
cognitive development. Given that emotions are highly salient
environmental cues, I would like to investigate this underlying
cognitive mechanisms of emotional perception and answer questions suchs
as: how do we represent emotions in the brain? What can account for
representing emotions one way over another? What are the functions of
fast and accurate emotion categorization? What are the
implications?
My current research focuses on exploring how emotional facial expressions are categorized. Specifically, I am investigating the relationships between emotion categories and looking to determine where category boundaries lie, the flexibility of these category boundaries, and if all basic emotions have firm boundaries. I am also interested in the development of emotions; future projects will explore how children develop adult-like emotial facial expression categories.