Timothée Mahieu

Timothée MAHIEU Doctoral Student Division of Social and Organizational Psychology    Address: Department of Psychology Catholic University of Louvain Place du Cardinal Mercier 10 (E317) 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve Belgium  Phone: +32 (0)10479301  Fax.: +32 (0)10474834  E-Mail:        Research domains    Representative publications

Research domains

• Social perception
• Embodiment
• “Perceptual Symbol System”
• Facial emotions

Role of social and representational factors in the processing of emotional information about others, using the framework of two fundamental dimensions in social perception.

In their social interaction, people pick up a large amount of information about others. Among this information, there are « perceived emotions ». People often use indeed emotional information to inquire about others’ intern state of mind, their behavioral intentions, their personality traits or their role in a group (Knutson, 1996). Because of their prominence, a lot of research has been done on facial expressions since Ekman (1973) and Izard (1972).

In my PhD, I’m investigating two lines of research. The first one focuses on the grounded cognition in the processing of emotional information. The second one concerns the role of social information in this processing.
 
Firstly, according to the theoretical framework of « embodiment », we are testing not only the influence of a motivational system (Marsh, Ambady, & Kleck, 2005), but also the influence of a vertical dimension (Meier & Robinson, 2004; Schubert, 2005) on facial expressions processing, especially the processing of fear and anger. To be more precise, an upwards perception and a reaction of avoidance could be associated with anger, and in contrast, a downwards perception and a reaction of approach could be associated with fear. Secondly, we are investigating the role of social information, like warmth, competence, status and competition in facial expressions processing. In our opinion, according to the kind of social information, we will perceive and recall differently an emotionally ambiguous face.

Representative publications

Kervyn, N., Dolderer, M., Mahieu, T., & Yzerbyt, V. (in press). Atipicality: a matter of content? European Journal of Social Psychology.

Mahieu, T. (June 2008). Consensus de la dimension de sociabilité : analyse dans le cadre des jugements de comportements. Master Thesis, UCL.