About me
I am a psychologist with a deep interest in the intersection of emotions, face perception, and mental health. My research focuses on understanding how emotions influence behavior and neural activity, in both clinical populations (e.g., individuals with depression or dementia) and general populations. To explore these questions, I use interdisciplinary methods, including behavioral and physiological recordings combined with advanced computational tools. I am currently leading a postdoctoral research project at Stanford University, funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation’s Postdoc Pool program, where I study emotional and behavioral disturbances in patients with sundown syndrome.
Beyond my academic work, I am an enthusiastic world traveler and scuba diver. I have explored 74 Travelers’ Century Club (TCC) countries and territories and spent over 3,000 minutes underwater. These experiences continue to fuel my curiosity and passion for discovering new perspectives.
Background
I began my academic journey with a Master’s degree in Psychology, earned in 2018 in China, before pursuing a PhD at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, which I completed in 2021. My doctoral research focused on neural and behavioral responses to emotional and somatosensory stimuli, with applications in understanding depression and emotional pain.
Afterward, I transitioned to the University of Oulu, where I joined the Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis (CMVS). There, I worked on the interdisciplinary “Emotion AI” project, led by Academy Prof. Guoying Zhao, combining computer vision and neuroscience to study emotional states. This experience deepened my understanding of multimodal data and its potential for detecting genuine versus posed emotions.
Through my research and collaborations, I aim to bridge psychology, neuroscience, and technology to address complex challenges and create meaningful impacts in mental health and emotional understanding.
📧Contact me: psy.qianru.xu@outlook.com
News
📌 Featured News
- Sep 2024, Excited to start my own project at Coglab led by Prof. Feng Vankee Lin at Stanford University, supported by Säätiöiden Post Doc -pooli from the Finnish Cultural Foundation
Stay tuned!😀
- Jan 2025, Attended the Experimental Psychology Society (EPS) meeting in London and listened to Daniel Yon’s lecture on Understanding Uncertainty in the Human Mind. He shared fascinating insights on how our own and others’ minds form beliefs about uncertainty. Truly inspiring!
- Nov 2024, New (and my first ever senior author) paper out in Behavioral Sciences! 🎉 This study explores how traditional values shape the moral development and well-being of Chinese adolescents. More on 👉link
- Nov 2024, Attended the Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting in NYC and had the honor of joining CowanFest to celebrate Nelson Cowan’s remarkable career and retirement. It was a exciting moment meeting him in person after knowing his work through textbooks, truly inspiring!💡
- Aug 2024, Thrilled to reach 350+ citations! 🎉 My first paper’s attention score of 18 was a great start, and I’m excited to keep working on more meaningful and impactful research. Grateful for all the support along the way! 🌟
- June 2024, Had a very meaningful birthday starting with a talk on “From Emotion AI to Cognitive AI” in “International Conference Series on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence” and joining a fascinating panel discussion. Check out more about our tutorial on “Human-AI mutual promotion for emotion and cognition understanding”.
- June 2024, Excited to share my new co-first author paper “The differential impact of face distractors on visual working memory across encoding and delay stages” just published on Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics! 📄 Through a series of behavioral experiments, we found that visual working memory (VWM) for faces is significantly disrupted by distractions during the delay stage, but not during encoding. This extends the processing mechanisms previously established for resisting distractions in VWM using simple stimuli to more complex real-world stimuli.
- May 2024, Gave a talk at the HI Lights seminar titled “Achieving Hybrid Intelligence from the Data and Algorithm Aspects” on the Tellus stage at the University of Oulu, Finland.
- May 2024, 👩🏫 Served as the Teaching Assistant for Professor Feng Vankee Lin’s doctoral course, “Personalization Intervention and Aging-Related Mental Health” (3 ECTS) and gained lots of valuable inspiration and insights!
- Mar 2024 Our abstract titled “Unmasking induced and posed emotions through EEG analysis” has been accepted to present at Social & Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS) 2024 in Toronto, Canada
- Feb 2024 our new review paper “Explorng Contactless Techniques in Multimodal Emotion Recognition: Insights into Diverse Applications, Challenges, Solutions, and Prospects” has been accepted for publication in Multimedia Systems
- Dec 2023 Great honor to be awarded the Postdoc Pool grant supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation 🧡
- Nov 2023 🛫 Thrilled to begin my journey as a visiting research scholar at Stanford University
- Nov 2023 🪧 Presented our latest database at Neuroscience 2023 and was delighted to connect with so many brilliant minds.
- Sept 2023 Excited to announce that I have been awarded the New Brain Travel Fellowship to attend Neuroscience 2023 in Washington D.C.!
- Sept 2023 I am happy to continue my lectures in Affective Computing 2023, and ready to share knowledge with the new intake of students 👩🏫
- July 2023 🎉 Exciting News! 🎉 Our groundbreaking research topic on “Cognitive Mechanisms of Visual Attention, Working Memory, Emotion, and their Interactions” has officially concluded! We received 45 submissions from brilliant minds worldwide, and 14 excellent papers have been published. To get an insightful summary of all the accepted papers, head over to our editorial. For an in-depth dive into the authors’ remarkable research, you can access each paper through their respective 🔗. Gratitude to all our incredible authors! 👏
- Mar 2023 Our newest paper “Pain modulates early sensory brain responses to task‐irrelevant emotional faces” is now published online in the journal of European Journal of Pain! 🎬 For a video abstract, please check this link 👉 link
- Feb 2023 Thrilled to share that I am involved in a new project as a sub-investigator, focusing on the early detection and intervention strategies for sundown syndrome in older adults
- Sep 2022 Serving as the instructor for graduate students in Affective computing 2022 (5 ECTS) at University of Oulu
- Aug 15, 2022 Joining the Editorial Board of Emotion Science @Frontiers in Psychology
- July 27, 2022 📢Serving as co-editor for the research topic “Cognitive mechanisms of visual attention, working memory, emotion, and their interactions” in Frontier in neuroscience & Frontiers in psychology. All papers related to this topic are warmly welcome! 👀Abstract Submission Deadline 19 September 2022
- July 2, 2022 🚨New preprint: Pain modulates early sensory brain responses to task-irrelevant emotional faces
- Jun 1, 2022 Poster presentation on “Vision Sciences Society Annual meeting 2022”, Vision Science Society, Florida, United States (virtual)
- Dec 10, 2021 Our brand new project website is live! Towards vision-based emotion AI (EmotionAI)
- Sep 1, 2021 Join Prof. Guoying Zhao’s group at CMVS 😀
- Aug 17, 2021 Defended my doctoral dissertation! 🎓
- Aug 1, 2018 Join Active Mind Lab led by Dr. Piia Astikainen