My primary research interest concerns the interplay between affect and cognition. What intrigues me is the great impact subtle manipulations of affect can have on people’s preferences, judgments, and behavioral tendencies. The activation of affect may, for instance, influence how people evaluate a person, whether people tend to approach or avoid a person, and how they interact with a person.

I am also interested in how consciousness relates to the affect-cognition interface. Do people need to be aware of their affective states in order for these states to have an influence? Can affective states be evoked without people’s awareness of the perceptions and memories that evoke these states? Besides research in social cognition, my sources of inspiration include Damasio (somatic marker hypothesis), Ramachandran (phantom pains), and LeDoux (cognitive-emotional interactions in the brain).

A second research domain that I am interested in is the flexibility of categorization. People can be categorized in multiple ways, for example in terms of gender, ethnic background, or occupation. I like to investigate how cognitive, motivational, and affective variables may interact in determining which categories perceivers use to categorize a person in a given situation. Related to this topic is the way situational cues may determine whether people perceive the world in terms of an intergroup context or an interpersonal context. It would be for instance interesting to investigate how mood or focus influences the perception of, and identification with different groups.

Thus, I am interested in the fundamental underpinnings of affective and cognitive information processing and how these processes relate to social psychological phenomena such as stereotyping and social categorization. My dissertation research concerned the role of the self in unconscious evaluative priming processes and basic processes involved in comparison in the context of person perception. Furthermore I have investigated the impact of self-activation on attention processes and the conditions wherein the activation of semantic concepts may unconsciously turn into a hot, mood state. My future research aims at investigating how affect and motivation may impact on basic categorization processes.