My research examines:

• The role of facial muscle activity in emotion understanding.  
• Effects of group membership on judgments of facial expressions, particularly smiles. 
• Individual and cultural differences in friendship.

My studies have been funded by British Academy/Leverhulme, British Council, and France's Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs.  

I am a Lecturer in Experimental Social Psychology and graduated with a PhD in social and cognitive psychology in 2014 (Clermont Auvergne University, France). 

Employment history

• Honorary Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2011-2021)
• Postdoctoral Research Associate, Cardiff University (2014-2017)
• Postdoctoral Research Associate, Queen's University Belfast (2017-2019)
• Lecturer in Experimental Social Psychology, Queen's University Belfast (2019-present)

I was princial supervisor of 1 PhD student (Philip Howlett, graduated in 2023) and 1 DClin student (Jodie McGoldrick, graduated in 2025). I was a co-supervisor of Katie McDade and Glenda Preston (DClin, graduated in 2025).   

I teach: 

PSY3133 Introduction to Cultural Psychology (Module Coordinator)

PSY1009 Introduction to Methods in Psychology

PSY1011 Using Psychology in Everyday Life

PSY2026 Psychological Methods

PSY7092 Applications of Psychology in the Real World

I have also acted as a tutor for L1 and L2 psychology students and supervised undergraduate as well as Conversion MSc theses. 

Download Links: Book Chapters

Rychlowska, M., Manstead, A. S. R., & van der Schalk, J. (2019). The many faces of smiles. In U. Hess & S. Hareli (Eds.), The social nature of emotion expression: What emotions can tell us about the world (pp. 227–245). Springer.

Manstead, A., Rychlowska, M., & van der Schalk, J. (2019). Chastening the future: What we learn from others' regret. In D. Dukes & F. Clément (Eds.), Foundations of affective social learning: Conceptualizing the social transmission of value (pp. 187–204). Cambridge University Press.

Download Links: Friendship Habits Questionnaire 

Links to download the FRIENDSHIP HABITS QUESTIONNAIRE (Howlett et al., 2023), a measure of group- versus dyadic-oriented styles of socializing with friends.

Click here for the questionnaire and scoring instructions  

Click here for the qsf file to import into survey platforms