Professor Rachael Jack
- Professor of Computational Social Cognition (Psychology)
- Associate (Institute of Neuroscience & Psychology)
telephone: 01413305087
email: Rachael.Jack@glasgow.ac.uk
Student office hours: Tuesday 3-5pm. Please email to arrange an appointment.
Research interests
Rachael Jack is a Professor in the Institute of Neuroscience & Psychology/School of Psychology, University of Glasgow. Her research has produced significant advances in understanding facial expression of emotion within and across cultures using a novel interdisciplinary approach that combines psychophysics, social psychology, dynamic 3D computer graphics, and mathematical psychology. Most notably, she has revealed cultural specificities in facial expressions of emotion; that four, not six, expressive patterns are common across cultures; and that facial expressions transmit information in a hierarchical structure over time. Together, Jack’s work has challenged the dominant view that six basic facial expressions of emotion are universal, which has led to a new theoretical framework of facial expression communication that she is now transferring to digital agents to synthesize culturally sensitive social avatars and robots.
Jack’s work has featured in several high-profile scientific outlets (e.g., Annual Review of Psychology, Current Biology, Psychological Science, PNAS, TICS). She is currently funded by the European Research Council (ERC) to lead the research program Computing the Face Syntax of Social Face Signals, which will deliver a formal model of human social face signalling with transference to social robotics. She has been funded previously by the ESRC Future Research Leaders award, ESRC Open Research Area, and British Academy.
Jack is recipient of the American Psychological Association (APA) New Investigator award, the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS) Innovation award, the British Psychological Society (BPS) Spearman Medal, Association for Psychological Science (APS) Rising Star award, and International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE) Young Researcher Spotlight.
She is also Associate Editor at Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and on the Editorial Boards of Emotion, Affective Science, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition (and formerly Psychological Science).
Jack also serves a variety of roles on the committees/boards for the conferences of the Society for Affective Sciences (Chair of Program Committee 2021), IEEE Automatic Face & Gesture Recognition (Area Chair, Special Sessions Co-Chair, PC Co-Chair), Intelligent Virtual Agents (General Co-Chair), and the Vision Science Society (Abstract Review Board). She is also Chair of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) Internationalization Committee.
• 2021 Chair, Internationalization Committee, Association for Psychological Science (APS)
• 2021 Chair, Program Committee, Society for Affective Science (SAS), St Louis, USA [virtual]
• 2021 Co-Chair, Program Committee, IEEE Automatic Face & Gesture Recognition conference, India
• 2020 General Co-Chair, ACM Intelligent Virtual Agents, Glasgow, UK [virtual]
• 2020 Guest Editor, PLoS Computational Biology
• 2020 Co-Chair, Special Sessions, IEEE Automatic Face & Gesture Recognition conference, Buenos Aires, Argentina [virtual]
• 2019 - Associate Editor, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
• 2019 - Associate Editor, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
• 2019 - Editorial Board, Affective Science
• 2019 - 20 Head of Abstracts, Program Committee. Society for Affective Sciences (SAS), Boston/San Francisco, USA [virtual]
• 2019 - Abstract Review Board, Vision Sciences Society (VSS), Florida, USA
• 2018 - 19 Editorial Board, Psychological Science
• 2017 Spearman Medal, British Psychological Society (BPS)
• 2017 - 19 Area Chair, Programme Committee, IEEE Automatic Face & Gesture Recognition conference, USA, China, France
• 2016 Rising Star, Association for Psychological Science (APS)
• 2016 Innovation Award, Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS)
• 2015 Young Researcher Spotlight, International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE)
• 2014 - Editorial Board, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
• 2014 Elected Member of The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), Young Academy of Scotland (YAS)
• 2013 New Investigator Award, American Psychological Association (APA)
Supervision
Supervised Postgraduate Students
- Sumita Chatterjee (Non Ψ Postgraduate)
- Anna Henschel (Postgraduate)
- Laura Hensel (Postgraduate)
- Meng Liu (Non Ψ Postgraduate)
- Tommaso Querci (Postgraduate)
- Yuening Yan (Postgraduate)
Research Assistant
- Chaona Chen (Research Associate)
Visiting Collaborators
- Thora Björnsdóttir (External Collaborator)
- Mary Ellen Foster (Visiting Researcher)