Dr Magdalena Rychlowska
Research Associate
- rychlowska@cardiff.ac.uk
- +44 (0)29 2087 0430
- Tower Building, 70 Park Place, Cardiff, CF10 3AT
Research summary
My research focuses on expressions of emotions, their effects and the mechanisms underlying their perception and interpretation. In my current project, I examine whether and how emotions of other people influence the way we cooperate in intergroup social dilemmas. For example, seeing someone who is selfish and happy about it can make us less altruistic than seeing this person express regret about being selfish. Importantly, the impact of emotions may vary as a function of the group status of this other person.
I am also interested in facial expressions of emotion, especially the smile, which is arguably the most complex and versatile among them. Some of my studies explore the role of eye contact and facial mimicry in the perception and interpretation of other people’s smiles. I manipulate these behaviors in the laboratory while also examining them in more ecological contexts: across cultures, in babies using pacifiers over long periods of time, and in facial palsy patients.
Postgraduate education
2005 - Master’s degree, French Literature, University of Wroclaw, Poland
2010 – Master’s degree, Social and Cognitive Psychology, Universite Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France (advisor: Paula Niedenthal)
2014 – PhD, Social and Cognitive Psychology, Universite Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand (advisors: Sylvie Droit-Volet, Paula Niedenthal)
2020
- Rychlowska, M. and Vanderwert, R. 2020. The pacified face: early embodiment processes and the use of dummies. Frontiers in Psychology 11, article number: 387. (10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00387)
2019
- Shore, D. M.et al. 2019. Intergroup emotional exchange: ingroup guilt and outgroup anger increase resource allocation in trust games. Emotion 19(4), pp. 605-616. (10.1037/emo0000463)
- Rychlowska, M.et al. 2019. Beyond actions: reparatory effects of regret in intergroup trust games. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 82, pp. 74-84. (10.1016/j.jesp.2019.01.006)
2017
- Rychlowska, M.et al. 2017. Functional smiles: tools for love, sympathy, and war. Psychological Science 28(9), pp. 1259-1270. (10.1177/0956797617706082)
- Reimer, N. K.et al. 2017. Intergroup Contact and Social Change. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 43(1), pp. 121-136. (10.1177/0146167216676478)
2016
- Wood, A., Rychlowska, M. and Niedenthal, P. M. 2016. Heterogeneity of long-history migration predicts emotion recognition accuracy. Emotion 16(4), pp. 413-420. (10.1037/emo0000137)
- Wood, A.et al. 2016. Fashioning the face: sensorimotor simulation contributes to facial expression recognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20(3), pp. 227-240. (10.1016/j.tics.2015.12.010)
2015
- Rychlowska, M.et al. 2015. Heterogeneity of long-history migration explains cultural differences in reports of emotional expressivity and the functions of smiles. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112(19), pp. E2429-E2436. (10.1073/pnas.1413661112)
2014
- Rychlowska, M.et al. 2014. Blocking mimicry makes true and false smiles look the same. PLoS ONE 9(3), article number: e90876. (10.1371/journal.pone.0090876)
- Rychlowska, M.et al. 2014. Pacifiers disrupt adults' responses to infants' emotions. Basic and Applied Social Psychology 36(4), pp. 299-308. (10.1080/01973533.2014.915217)
2012
- Niedenthal, P. M.et al. 2012. Negative relations between pacifier use and emotional competence. Basic and Applied Social Psychology 34(5), pp. 387-394. (10.1080/01973533.2012.712019)
- Rychlowska, M.et al. 2012. From the eye to the heart: eye contact triggers emotion simulation. Presented at: 14th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, Santa Monica, CA, 22-26 October 2012Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Eye Gaze in Intelligent Human Machine Interaction. New York, NY:, (10.1145/2401836.2401841)
2010
- Niedenthal, P. M., Augustinova, M. and Rychlowska, M. 2010. Body and mind: Zajonc's (re)introduction of the motor system to emotion and cognition. Emotion Review 2(4), pp. 340-347. (10.1177/1754073910376423)
Funding
Economic and Social Research Council Grant (ESRC-ORA), “Communicating appraisals and social motives (CASM): Interpersonal effects of regulated and unregulated emotion expression”. 2014-2016, £396,756.
Research group
Supervisors: Prof. Tony Manstead, Dr Job van der Schalk
Research collaborators
Sylvie Droit-Volet (Université Blaise Pascal)
Agneta Fischer (University of Amsterdam)
Jonathan Gratch (University of Southern California)
Rachael Jack (University of Glasgow)
Paula Niedenthal (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Brian Parkinson (University of Oxford)
Philippe Schyns (University of Glasgow)
Danielle Shore (University of Oxford)