Dr. Cassidy is recruiting MA and PhD students for the 2025-2026 academic year.

The Social Cognition Lab team researches how people perceive, evaluate, understand, and evaluate others through multiple lenses and methods. The lab has access to a 3T MRI scanner, an in-lab eye-tracker, and a database of community-dwelling older adults. 

Decoding people’s mental states via their facial emotions facilitates social interactions because it enables the prediction of intentions. Some emotions are more complex (e.g., suspicious) than others (e.g., anger). Given their contribution to navigating complex social environments and humanization, much work has sought to identify mechanisms for complex emotion decoding from faces or specific features such as eye regions. Most work has focused on top-down factors affecting this decoding (e.g., cultural differences). Our work focuses on bottom-up perceptual factors. This focus is important because although top-down factors might be more obvious targets for interventions, these interventions may be ineffective if bottom-up perceptual factors are not also acknowledged.