Abstract:
My lab uses facial neuromuscular electric stimulation (fNMES), in combination with EEG, to investigate the role of facial feedback in emotion at the behavioural and neural level. This provides us with a high degree of control over which muscles are activated when and to what degree. In this talk, I will discuss if and how activation of the smiling muscles with fNMES influences emotion recognition at the behavioural and neural level.
Biography
I have a Master’s in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Utrecht, and a PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Geneva (where I was at the Swiss Centre for Affective Science). My main research interest: the perception and production of emotional expression, mainly in the face, and their neural correlates. I look at this from an embodied cognition perspective, but I am also interested and have worked on social and nonsocial rewards, and all sorts of things face related.
I have done so using all sorts of techniques to measure brain activity (EEG, fMRI) and peripheral physiology (including EMG, which was my main technique for a while), and to modulate them (TMS, pharmacology). I got to the University of Essex in January 2020, and with the help of a grant from the Austrian Science Fund I built up a lab for doing fNMES and integrating it with EEG.