My research interests all center around the concept of empathy, which I define as "a receiver's internal experience of the emotion displayed by a sender." In particular, I am interested in the characteristics of a sender's emotional expression that make it seem naturalistic, and under what conditions that leads to empathy in the receiver. These characteristics include the timing and coordination of muscle movements, the ecological context of the expression, the medium through which the expression is sent (face-to-face or mediated), and the interactional synchrony in expressions of both sender and receiver. This has several applications across traditional fields of communication sciences, including interpersonal, mass media, new communication technology, political, and health communication.

My dissertation is an fMRI study of neocortical and limbic system BOLD activation to four types of spontaneous emotional expression, and how these activations may relate to the way the brain produces an empathic response. I am also involved in a project that looks at the impact of a delay in video/audio signal on interpersonal emotion communication accuracy, speech coordination, and heart rate. I am certified in the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which I have used to describe the "double bind" in the facial expressions of a mother and her son with schizophrenia as they view photos of each other. I have also worked on projects addressing the impact of Huntington's Disease (HD) on the emotion communication between a person with HD and his/her caregivers. More recently, I have collaborated with Ross Buck on a paper exploring the role of mirror neurons in the processing of mass media images.