Research

Emotions unfold over time, but much of emotion perception research has studied them through isolated cues, such as static facial expressions or single emotion labels. My work builds on the Event Segmentation Theory framework to study emotion perception as a dynamic process: people must decide when an emotional event begins, changes, or ends, often from complex and context-rich social information.

To study this process, I developed the Emotion Segmentation Paradigm, in which participants watch naturalistic videos and indicate when they perceive changes in others’ emotions. Across three samples, this paradigm captured reliable individual differences in how people segment emotional events. This work also showed that people with richer active emotion vocabularies tend to segment emotion in ways that more closely align with group-level consensus.

Language is central to how people organize emotional experience, but emotion labels may do more than describe what people already perceive. They may activate conceptual knowledge, constrain attention, and change how perceivers interpret unfolding social information. My work asks when language helps people coordinate emotional meaning, and when it changes the process of perception itself.

In experimental work using the Emotion Segmentation Paradigm, I find that explicitly labeling emotions can reshape how people identify emotional events, making perceivers more conservative and less sensitive when distinguishing emotion from non-emotion events. My ongoing work inspects the role of conceptual knowledge in this process.

Beyond individual perception, I also study how emotion labels function in relationships. My colleague and I developed the Partner Emotion Labeling Scale and Reaction to Partner Emotion Labeling Scale (PELS-RELS) to measure individual differences in how people label a partner’s emotions and how they respond when a partner labels their emotions. My ongoing work extends this line of work to naturalistic interaction by examining real conversations between romantic partners.

People do not infer emotions in a vacuum. Cultural norms, social roles, language, and shared histories shape what people attend to, what they expect others to feel, and whose emotions are treated as legible or credible. I approach culture not simply as a group-difference variable, but as a meaning system that organizes social-emotional inference.

In ongoing work, I collected cross-cultural samples from Singapore and the U.S., and examined cultural variation in emotion segmentation, including whether people from different cultural contexts rely on different cues when identifying emotional events. I also study individual differences in cross-cultural mental state inference and the relevant behavioral and political implications.