About Paula

Paula Niedenthal
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Paula M. Niedenthal received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and was on the faculty of the departments of Psychology at Johns Hopkins University and Indiana University (USA). She was a member of the National Centre for Scientific Research in France for more than a decade and is now Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her areas of research include emotion-cognition interaction, representational models of emotion and the processing of facial expression. Dr. Niedenthal is a fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Research Interests:

Because it focuses on the ways by which individuals represent and process emotional information, my research is best described as crossing the areas of the Social Psychology of Emotion and the Affective Neurosciences. Of current interest in my laboratory are the twin problems of the function of and the processing of facial expression of emotion. To address these problems scientifically, our research examines neural, cognitive, social and cultural/societal influences on two important information processing mechanisms, namely facial mimicry and eye gaze. Most recently our particular focus is on the human smile. You can read about the model that guides some of this work in a New York Times article by Carl Zimmer, here(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/science/25smile.html?pagewanted=all)