Wendy Berry Mendes
Wendy Berry Mendes is the Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology at Yale University. She was previously the Sarlo/Ekman Professor of Emotion at University of California, San Francisco, United States and prior to that position was the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University. Her expertise is in the area of emotion, intergroup relationships, stigma and psychophysiology. At Yale she is the founder and director of the Emotion, Health, and Psychophysiology Lab in the Department of Psychology.
Education
Mendes received her bachelor's and master's degrees from California State University, Long Beach. She then received her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2003 and for two years she was a post-doctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco.Employment and publications
Mendes joined the faculty of Harvard in 2004 as an assistant professor of psychology and was promoted to associate professor in 2008. She was a core faculty member of the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars program which is run by the Harvard School of Public Health, and in 2010 she moved to UC San Francisco. At UCSF she was the Director of the Health Psychology Program and Deputy Vice Chair of Psychiatry. In the fall of 2023, she started her current position at Yale University in the Psychology Department.Mendes co-wrote the book Social Psychophysiology for Social and Personality Psychology. She co-edited the Handbook of Social Psychology, 6th edition with Daniel T. Gilbert, Susan Fiske, and Eli Finkel, which was the first edition to be open-access.
She has published articles in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Psychosomatic Medicine , Emotion , American Journal of Public Health, Clinical Psychological Science, Social Psychological and Personality Science and many other scholarly peer-review journals. Her research questions sit at the intersection of social, personality, and biological psychology and primarily concern embodiment - how emotions, thoughts, and intentions are experienced in the body and how bodily responses shape and influence thoughts, behavior and emotions. Some current research areas include coping with stigma and discrimination, dyadic intergroup interactions, affect contagion, mind-body relations across the life course, influence of emotional labeling on emotional experience