Research interests

My work examines the communication of emotions via non-verbal signals. Much of my research has focused on vocalisations such as laughter, cries and sighs, but I have also studied facial expressions of emotions. I am interested in how factors such as culture, learning mechanisms, and language, shape our emotions and the ways that they are signalled. Complementing this, I ask which aspects of our emotions and emotional signals exhibit less plasticity. My research includes experimental psychological methods with adults and infants, and cross-cultural comparisons. I also have a particular interest in positive emotions, and distinctions between different positive affective states.

Biography

I did my BSc  in Psychology and Cognitive Science at University College London (2002), followed by a PhD in the same department (2006). Then I worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, after which I received an ESRC fellowship, which I took up at Birkbeck College London. In 2008 I moved to the Netherlands to work as a staff researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, where I stayed until 2011. I now hold a Veni grant (2011-2016) from the Dutch Science Foundation, and I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Psychology at UvA.

Selected publications (see Publications page for full list)

Sauter, D., Le Guen, O., & Haun, D. B. M. (2011). Categorical perception of emotional expressions does not require lexical categories. Emotion, 11(6) , 1479-1483 .

Sauter, D., Eisner, F., Ekman, P., & Scott, S. K. (2010). Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalizations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(6), 2408-2412.  

Sauter, D. (2010). More than happy: The need for disentangling positive emotions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 36-40. 

Sauter, D., & Scott, S. K. (2007). More than one kind of happiness: Can we recognize vocal expressions of different positive states? Motivation and Emotion, 31(3), 192-199. 

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