Biography
Menghan received her B.S in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has worked as a facial-behavior analysis specialist using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) in Dr. Catherine Fairbairn’s lab since 2015 in the Psychology department.
Research Interests
- Emotion and behavioral outcomes
- Facial perception (e.g., facial mimicry, emotion awareness)
- Social processes (e.g., group formation, interpersonal relationship building)
- Alcohol and social rewards
- Addiction
Research Description
Menghan’s research interests focus on how individuals’ emotions during social interactions affect their behavioral outcomes. Using FACS (an anatomically based system that codes all visually discriminable facial movements) to capture individuals’ spontaneous emotional experiences, she explores how expressed emotions may foster an individual’s attitude/feeling and influence their social decisions and behaviors.