Beatrice de Gelder

Education

Areas of research

• Face recognition: De Gelder has shown that brain damage in one area does not simply lead to loss of a specific function but that intact brain areas can actively interfere with normal function. This resulted in a new model of face recognition. For this research and as a service to the community she recruited persons with face recognition difficulties through a dedicated website
• Multisensory perception of emotion integrating facial expressions speech prosody: This work was the first to investigate the perceptual combination of facial expression with emotional voice signals and measure EEG. Her team published evidence for emotional face/voice integration in autism and in schizophrenia.
• Nonconscious emotion perception in hemianopia patients : De Gelder discovered that without V1 cortex, there is still recognition of facial expressions albeit unconsciously, an entirely novel finding that has since then been replicated in different labs.
• Emotional body expressions: In 2003 de Gelder published the first neuroscientific study on emotional body perception. Her team was the first to combine methods of psychology and neuropsychology with novel neuroscience tools – like EEG and fMRI – in research on bodily expressions and have put this topic on the agenda for a new generation of affective scientists.
• Scene context: De Gelder initiated a new research line on the study on emotional scene gist and its effect on face recognition. This opened new perspectives for investigating emotion deficits in schizophrenia and autism.
• Social interaction: De Gelder explored social interaction using realistic stimuli and recently published the first fMRI study using realistic interaction videos of interpersonal threat situations.