Psychology Faculty Profiles
Joan Y. Chiao, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Brain, Behavior, and Cognition; Social Psychology
Office: Swift 113
Phone: (847) 467-0481
E-mail: jchiao@northwestern.edu
Research Interests
How do cultural and biological forces give rise to everyday emotion and social interaction? I use a 'cultural neuroscience' framework to investigate how cultural factors influence basic psychological and neural processes underlying social behavior and emotion processing, using functional neuroimaging (fMRI), event-related potentials (ERP), genotyping and behavioral paradigms. Research in my lab also examines how high-level factors, such as race, gender and age, affect basic cognitive, perceptual and emotional processes. At a broader level, I'm interested in integrating psychology and neuroscience research with public policy and population health issues.
Selected Publications
Chiao, J.Y., Iidaka, T., Gordon, H.L., Nogawa, J., Bar, M., Aminoff, E., Sadato, N., Ambady, N. (in press). Cultural specificity in amygdala response to fear faces. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Chiao, J.Y., Adams, R.B., Jr., Tse, P.U., Lowenthal, W.T., Richeson, J.A., Ambady, N. (in press). Knowing who is boss: fMRI and ERP investigations of social dominance perception. Group Relations and Intergroup Processes (Special Issue in Social Neuroscience).
Chiao, J.Y. & Ambady, N. (in press). Cultural neuroscience: Parsing universality and diversity across levels of analysis. In Kitayama, S. and Cohen, D. (Eds.) Handbook of Cultural Psychology, Guilford Press, NY.
Chiao, J.Y., Heck, H.E., Nakayama, K., & Ambady, N. (2006). Priming race in biracial observers affects visual search for Black and White faces. Psychological Science, 17(5), 388-393.
Ambady, N., Chiao, J.Y., Chiu, P., & Deldin, P. (2005). Race and emotion recognition: Insights from a social neuroscience perspective. In Cacioppo, J.T., Pickett, C., Vicker, P., (Eds.) Social Neuroscience: People thinking about thinking people. MIT Press, Cambridge.
Chiao, J.Y., Bordeaux, A.R., & Ambady, N. (2004). Mental representations of social status. Cognition, 93(2), B49-57.
Golby, A.J., Gabrieli, J.D.E., Chiao, J.Y., & Eberhardt, J.L. (2001). Differential fusiform responses to same- and other-race faces. Nature Neuroscience, 4(8), 845-50.
