Current Projects

RESCO 2025-2027 | Eye contact and couples’ responsiveness: Cultural and gender differences

Eye contact is one of the most studied behaviors in research on affective nonverbal communication. People intuitively associate it with positive emotional experiences, and one key affective process linked to eye contact is partners’ responsiveness, defined as the ability to make one’s partner feel understood, validated, and cared for. However, few studies have considered cultural and gender differences in eye contact. The RESCO project aims to investigate the role of eye contact in conveying partners’ responsiveness across cultural and gender differences.

GENCA 2025-2026 | The social consequences of gendered perception

Are gender stereotypes really decreasing? Although explicit gender stereotypes appear to be shifting toward neutrality, research suggests that they may still be activated spontaneously. Gender is a way to relate with others, which is coherent with why people spontaneously gender faces into binary sex/gender categories (i.e., gender categorization). This rapid, often unconscious categorization may trigger gender stereotype activation—even if people explicitly reject those stereotypes. The GENCA project investigates whether these implicit processes shape explicit judgments and behaviors, and how they apply to non-binary individuals who disrupt binary gender expectations. This project aims to uncover how gendered perception connects to stereotype persistence, contributing to the understanding bias in everyday social interactions.

**PARLA 2024-2025 | The language of acceptance: Parents’ understanding of their trans* children’s experience @MUSIC**

Family support is an important factor in gender-diverse individuals’ development and well-being. Yet, some parents struggle to understand or accept their children’s experiences. How can we foster a more inclusive environment bringing families together? The MUSIC clinic provides psycho-educational group therapy to guide parents of trans* and gender-nonconforming individuals of all ages in their understanding and acceptance of their children’s experiences. The project PARLA aims to investigate the processes that support the parents’ journey. By applying language analysis techniques, we want to discover the key learnings and emotional experiences that support parents’ acceptance. This project will help assess the quality of MUSIC’s group therapy and identify the best practices to continue and/or improve these services.

FORMA 2024-2026 | The impact of gaze on social cognition

We often hear that the eyes are the mirror of a person’s soul. But do eyes really play a central role in social interaction? Previous research has suggested that looking into someone’s eyes may facilitate certain social processes, such as forming first impressions and subsequent social cognition. However, most studies of social attention have been conducted using virtual stimuli, such as images or videos of people, rather than face-to-face social interactions. In collaboration with Lauren Human, the FORMA project aims to investigate how visual attention during face-to-face interactions contributes to first impression formation and subsequent joint attention.

JADIS 2023-25 | Joint attention and discrimination

Social discrimination against underrepresented groups plagues our society at multiple levels. What if we had a simple tool to cure it? Rogers et al. 2014 showed that gaze-induced implicit learning of trust influenced subsequent economic transactions such that participants made more altruistic donations to individuals whose gaze had always been predictive of target location in a previous gaze-cuing task. The present project, in collaboration with Andrew Bayliss, aims to investigate whether this implicit learning of trust induced by gaze behaviours can be used to increase intergroup giving, which could in turn be a powerful tool for reducing social discrimination between different social groups.

GESTA 2023-25 | Joint attention and gender

In a park, one of your friends suddenly looks away, and you can’t help but follow their gaze. You look where they look, and it’s almost like you’re looking at the world through their eyes: Is it for their intense gaze or because you trust them?

Research in social attention gives us some clues: human behaviors are influenced by visible social cues, like biological sex, and more abstract ones, like others’ social status.

Can even more dynamic and complex phenomena, such as stereotypes, have such an influence? For instance, is a leader’s gaze more relevant to us? And what is the role of others’ gender? Using an online experimental design, the aim of GESTA is to identify the human social features and their interactions that have an impact on these attentional behaviors. Its first phase, in collaboration with Mario Dalmaso, focuses more specifically on the gender and social status of the people with whom we interact.