Overview
Our research investigates how people perceive, interpret and respond to the emotions, intentions and actions of others. We examine how social information is communicated through body movement, voice and interaction, and how the brain transforms these signals into impressions of emotion, personality, threat and intent.
A central focus is individual variation in social perception. We investigate how empathy, experience, autistic traits and predictive processes influence social and emotional interpretation. This research combines behavioural experiments, brain imaging, neurofeedback and lived-experience approaches.
Research Themes
Our research examines social and emotional perception across five connected areas, from interpreting movement and voice to understanding individual responses to people and artificial agents.
Methods and capabilities
We combine experimental psychology, neuroscience and qualitative research to study social perception at behavioural, neural and experiential levels.
Selected publications
The World Is Nuanced but Pixelated: Autistic Individuals’ Perspective on HIPPEA
Greta Krasimirova Todorova, Rosalind Elizabeth McBean Hatton, Sarveen Sadique and Frank Earl Pollick
Autism, 28(2), 498–509, 2024.
This study used questionnaires and interviews to investigate whether the HIPPEA predictive-processing account reflects autistic people’s lived experiences. The findings identified areas where the theory was useful and areas requiring further refinement. Read the publication
Incongruence Effects in Cross-Modal Emotional Processing in Autistic Traits: An fMRI Study
Peipei Liu, Margaret Sutherland and Frank E. Pollick
Neuropsychologia, 161, 107997, 2021.
This research examined how autistic traits influence behavioural and neural responses when emotional information from different sensory channels is incongruent. Read the publication
Brain Circuits Signaling the Absence of Emotion in Body Language
Arseny A. Sokolov, Peter Zeidman, Michael Erb, Frank E. Pollick, Andreas J. Fallgatter, Philippe Ryvlin, Karl J. Friston and Marina Pavlova
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(34), 20868–20873, 2020.
This study examined the neural networks that allow people to distinguish emotional from non-emotional body language, showing that amygdala–insula connectivity contributes to recognising an absence of emotion. Read the publication
Empathy to Emotional Voices and the Use of Real-Time fMRI to Enhance Activation of the Anterior Insula
Dana Kanel, Salim Al-Wasity, Kristian Stefanov and Frank E. Pollick
NeuroImage, 198, 53–62, 2019.
This study used real-time fMRI neurofeedback to investigate whether participants could increase anterior-insula activity while listening to emotional voices and how regulation related to empathic traits. Read the publication
Experience in Judging Intent to Harm Modulates Parahippocampal Activity: An fMRI Study with Experienced CCTV Operators
Karin Petrini, Philip McAleer, Catherine Neary, Julia Gillard and Frank E. Pollick
Cortex, 57, 74–91, 2014.
This research examined how professional experience with identifying potentially harmful behaviour changes behavioural performance and neural responses to social actions. Read the publication