The Major–blascovich Lecture Series in Psychological Science Inaugural Lecture

WENDY BERRY MENDES, PhD, is the Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology at Yale University. She received her PhD in social psychology from UC Santa Barbara in 2003 and completed a postdoc at UCSF in psychology & medicine. Her research focuses on how the brain and body respond to emotion and stress using a variety of methods including autonomic physiology, neuroendocrinology, and immunology. She applies this methodological approach to research areas such as racial health disparities, stereotyping and prejudice, emotion and decision-making, and dyadic and group physiological synchrony. Her research approach includes lab, field, and app-based studies. In one app-based research study called MyBPLab, she leveraged an optic sensor embedded in phones and wearables to estimate blood pressure responses. The study enrolled more than 250,000 people from over 100 countries and participants tracked their stress, emotion, and blood pressure providing more than 5 million daily check-ins.

On Oct. 9, Mendes, the Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology at Yale University, will return to UC Santa Barbara to deliver the inaugural Major-Blascovich Lecture in Psychological Science. The lecture connects her research on how people influence one another’s physiological responses with the intellectual and mentoring traditions that helped shape her career.

The public lecture begins at 11 a.m. in the Sage Room, Psych 1312. Her topic is “Affect contagion: Physiologic synchrony among strangers and close others.”

The lecture details can be read here.