Elected officers
President
Disa Sauter is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). She did her BSc in Psychology and Cognitive Science at University College London (2002), followed by a PhD in the same department (2006). She then worked as a post-doctoral researcher at King’s College London and Birkbeck College London, before moving to the Netherlands to take up a staff researcher position at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Since 2011, she has been based at the University of Amsterdam. Sauter’s research examines emotion with a particular focus on non-verbal expressions, especially vocalisations like laughs, sighs, and screams. She is interested in how factors such as preparedness, culture, and learning shape our emotions and how they are communicated. Her work makes use of a wide range of methods from psychology and other disciplines, including cross-cultural comparisons and computational analyses. In recent years, she has also been studying emotions in relation to sustainability and pro-environmental behaviour.
Past President
Ursula Hess has been president of ISRE from 2019 to 2024. She is Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at the Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany). Hess earned her Diploma in Psychology from Justus-Liebig University in 1986 and her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Dartmouth College in 1989. After a post-doc at the University of Geneva, she spent 17 years at the University of Quebec at Montreal. Her research primarily focuses on the communication of emotions, exploring how social factors like gender and intergroup relations influence this process. Currently her work focuses on facial mimicry and the social signal value of emotions, which has significant implications for understanding person perception and cross-cultural communication. In her research she uses a variety of approaches including psychophysiology. She has published over 200 papers as well as several edited books.
Treasurer
Eric Walle is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological Science at the University of California, Merced (the United States of America). He is the Director of the Interpersonal Development Lab, where he conducts research examining emotion, socio-emotional development, and developmental transitions. He is particularly interested in the functions of emotions in interpersonal contexts, such as emotion responding, emotion regulation, and empathy. He conducts empirical research with infants, children, and adults, examining topics including behavioral responding to others’ discrete emotions, perceiving others’ emotions, and the role of social cognition in the development of emotion understanding. Additionally, his recent work has examined how children and adolescents serve as emotion brokers by translating cross-cultural differences in emotion norms, particularly when the family has recently immigrated to a new culture. He also conducts research examining how developmental transitions (e.g., the onset of walking) impact infant language, cognition, emotion, and social interactions. He was a Co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development and serves as an Associate Editor for Infancy, Emotion Review, and Affective Science.
Secretary
Milica Nikolić is Assistant Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the Research Institute of Child Development and Education, University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands). Her research focuses on the development of self-conscious emotions in young children and how these emotions contribute to their daily functioning. She uses naturalistic tasks to evoke genuine emotions and employs precise micro-codings of behaviours and neuro-physiological measures to capture emotions. Her work integrates developmental psychology approaches with insights and methods from other disciplines, including cognitive and affective science. Currently, she is the PI of a project examining the development of self-conscious shyness in infancy, supported by a Veni grant from the Netherlands Research Council. She is also the founder of Becoming Social, a popular science website that translates scientific insights on child social development into stories and tolls for caregivers and educators.
Membership Secretary
Tanja S. H. Wingenbach is Lecturer in Psychology at the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading (the United Kingdom). After completing her PhD at the University of Bath in 2016, she held postdoctoral positions at the Social and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Mackenzie Presbyterian University in São Paulo, Brazil, and the Department of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry and Psychosomatic Medicine at University Hospital Zurich and the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She took up her first lectureship in 2022 at the University of Greenwich, UK, in the School of Human Sciences. She has been a member of ISRE since 2013 and became actively involved in 2015 when she volunteered for the Early Career Researcher Section (ECRS). Over the course of seven years, she contributed to ECRS in various capacities, including serving as Chair from 2019 to 2022. Her research focuses on emotions with an emphasis on facial expressions, in both typical and clinical populations, including autism. By combining experimental methods with biological measures, such as facial electromyography (EMG), she explores the embodiment of emotion, facial mimicry, and emotion judgments. Her work aims to enhance existing methodologies and deepen our theoretical understanding of emotional processes. Her greater research goals are to advance emotion theory by integrating biological and behavioural mechanisms; and to inform interventions for individuals with clinical conditions.
ISRE Early Career Researcher Group Liaison
Manuel (Manny) Gonzalez is Assistant Professor in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Montclair State University (New Jersey, the United States of America). Much of Manny’s research revolves around two broad topics: (1) the influences of emotions (felt or expressed) in the workplace on personal, interpersonal, and organizational outcomes, and (2) justice-related and ethical issues in the workplace, with a recent focus on fairness issues that emerge when implementing organizational tools that utilize artificial intelligence. In his research, he attempts to push back against various assumptions made by researchers and laypersons alike regarding what is “good” and what is “bad”. For example, he has found that (a) people can react to envy constructively, despite it being an unpleasant emotion to experience, (b) distractions can sometimes improve task performance, particularly when the task is simple, and (c) social support from coworkers can make highly cynical people less satisfied with their jobs. Through his research, Manny seeks to promote a more nuanced understanding of the work context, and to contribute to organizational interventions that foster a psychologically healthy and productive work environment. Within ISRE, Manny is the chair of the Early Career Researchers Section (ECRS) where he oversees initiatives that provide professional development and community-building opportunities to ISRE’s junior members.
Members of the Board
Jonathan Gratch is Research Full Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at the University of Southern California (USC, the United States of America) and Director for Virtual Human Research at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 1995. Dr. Gratch’s research focuses on computational models of human cognitive and social processes, especially emotion, and explores these models’ potential to advance psychological theory and shape human-machine interaction. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief (retired) of IEEE’s Transactions on Affective Computing, and Associate Editor for Emotion Review and Affective Science. He is former President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC) and a Fellow of AAAI, AAAC, and the Cognitive Science Society.
Olivier Luminet is Research Director at the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS), full professor at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) and associate professor at the Free University of Brussels (ULB). He is the past president of the Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences (BAPS). One part of his research activity is dedicated to the interactions between emotion, personality and health. He has published widely on alexithymia since 1999, including two books and more than 40 papers in international journals. He co-edited a special issue of Cognition and Emotion in 2021, including a review paper, and he is lead author on one that will be published in Annual Review of Psychology (2025). Another part of his research activity is dedicated to the links between emotion, identity and memories (both at the individual and at the collective levels). He has conducted several studies on cognitive and emotional determinants of flashbulb memories and their impact on collective memory. He was also involved in several interdisciplinary projects related to emotions and collective memory. Since 2020, he has been involved in research examining the impact of the covid pandemic on health behaviors and well-being, being principal investigator (PI) of a project on “Taking stock to foster health and trust for an inclusive post-covid society” (THRIVE) (2024-2027).
Magdalena Rychlowska is Lecturer in Experimental Social Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast (the United Kingdom). She completed her PhD in 2014 at the University of Clermont Auvergne in France and worked at Cardiff University before moving to the rainy lands of Northern Ireland. Prior to studying psychology, she earned an MSc in French studies, where she focused on the concept of friendship in the 18th century. Her current research explores facial expressions of emotion, particularly how altering or blocking facial movements can influence emotional processing. One way she approaches this is by examining how the use of pacifiers impacts interactions between mothers and infants, as well as the development of social competence later in life. She spends a lot of time studying smiles and laughter, which are complex social signals – not all smiles are happy, and not all laughs are friendly. These days, she also studies how spending time with friends differs across cultures and whether these differences affect how we look at faces.
Mikko Salmela is Associate Professor at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark – until the end of 2024) and Docent and Senior Researcher (from 2025 onwards) in Practical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki (Finland). His doctoral thesis (University of Helsinki, 1998) was on the history of Finnish philosophy, and he has studied emotions since his postdoc years. He first worked on normative issues relating to the nature, authenticity and appropriateness of individual emotions, then focused on collective emotions and their functions in the dynamics of social groups, and, in recent years, has turned towards the emotional dynamics of anti- and pro-democratic political movements. In his current research, he actively collaborates with scholars from various social sciences and humanities disciplines; especially in the context of the Horizon Europe consortium Politics of Grievance and Democratic Governance (PLEDGE, 2024–2027) that he will coordinate at the University of Helsinki from 2025 onwards. His first ISRE conference was Quebec City 2000, and he was a member of ISRE board (2011-2013).
Eric Vanman is Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland (Australia), specializing in social neuroscience and the psychology of technology. His work combines multiple methodologies, focusing on understanding people’s responses to technology. Recently, his research has focused on studying the mechanisms of empathy using a social neuroscience approach. He has investigated factors that may contribute to a lack of empathy for individuals who are different from us but has also extended this to human-robot interaction. He leads a laboratory that includes PhD and undergraduate students, focusing on the use of AI, robotics, and social media in psychological research. Eric is also interested in studying emotions and facial expressions, using facial EMG technology to investigate these areas. He is primarily known for his studies on racial prejudice. His research has indicated that the activation of facial muscles, specifically those that create frowning and smiling expressions, is linked to prejudiced and discriminatory behaviour, even in the absence of detectable facial displays of emotion. His early work on unconscious bias and its connection to psychophysiological measures laid the foundation for research on implicit measures that have been prominent in this research area for the last three decades.
Appointed Officers
Editor-in-Chief of Emotion Review
Brian Parkinson is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Oxford (the United Kingdom). His research focuses on the social psychology of emotion, facial expression, interpersonal emotion regulation and interpersonal affect transfer. His work is guided by the idea that emotions align people’s orientations towards each other and to the objects and events in their shared environment. His first-authored books include Ideas and Realities of Emotion (1995), Changing Moods (1996), and Emotion in Social Relations (2005). His latest book, Heart to Heart: How Your Emotions Affect Other People, was selected as one of the Outstanding Academic Titles of 2020 by Choice, the magazine of the American Library Association. He has served as Chief Editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology, and Associate Editor of Cognition and Emotion and Transactions in Affective Computing. He is currently Co-Editor of the book series Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction (Cambridge University Press), and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Emotion Review.
Editor-in-Chief of Emotion Researcher
Rebecca Dickason is Associate Professor at the IGR-IAE Graduate School of Management and at the Centre for Research in Economics and Management (CREM, University of Rennes, France). A member of EMONET, she envisages emotions from the angle of work and organizations and joined ISRE because she sees in it a unique interdisciplinary agora to further understand emotions, from individual and collective perspectives. She has recently published a narrative review of the literature on emotional labour in the Revue Française de Gestion, examining the filiations and evolutions of the concept across various disciplinary fields. As a keen observer of healthcare settings for many years, she has explored the emotional labour of hospital healthcare professionals diversely, through the prisms of time, space, and rules, and how they intertwine. She has also delved into the topic of the deteriorated mental health, trauma and pathological grief of physicians in the face of end of life and death, creating “Emotion4care”, a scientific blog, in 2022, coordinating an issue of the nursing journal Soins (Elsevier Masson), in 2023, and participating in a Symposium on grief at the US Academy of Management, in 2024. Her other ongoing projects include researching the history of emotional intelligence and exploring the links between the corporeal and emotional experiences at work.
Webmaster
Alessio Giarrizzo is Doctoral Assistant at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Geneva (Switzerland). He pursues his doctoral training in the field of adult education under the supervision of Professor Nathalie Delobbe, who leads the research team “Apprentissage et compétences au travail, en formation et dans les organisations (ACT’FOR)” [Learning and competence at work, in training, and in organizations]. He serves the International Society for Research on Emotion as webmaster. He obtained his master’s degrees in neuroscience and cognitive and affective psychology in 2019. During his basic academic training, he worked on the influence of stress on reward-seeking behaviors with a computational approach at the Laboratory for the study of Emotion Elicitation and Expression of the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences. In parallel, he also worked on interindividual differences in motivation in the Geneva Motivation Lab of the Psychology Section. With a variety of teaching experience in the university environment, from undergraduate students to professionals seeking continuing education at the University, he is particularly interested in the affective determinants of learning. His doctoral thesis explores the interaction of motivation, emotion, and learning in adults engaged in continuing education
Content Manager
Teerawat Monnor, approaching the end of his PhD (University of Geneva, Switzerland), conducts research on interpersonal-affective motivation, with a special interest in how these motivations shape prosocial behaviors. He has a background in computational physics and neuroscience and values interdisciplinary collaboration with the aim of creating real impact through partnerships across various fields. His recent interests include the psychological constructs of AI (if they exist) and how these might shape or mediate human-to-human interactions. As ISRE’s Communication Manager, Teerawat leverages his experience in science communication and community management to keep the society’s members informed and engaged. Ideas and suggestions on fostering a dynamic network where researchers at all career stages (and possibly across sectors) can openly connect and collaborate are warmly welcomed at info@isre.org.
