Paula Alarcón

My main interest lies in understanding how sure we are of what we feel at a given moment, i.e. metacognition of affective states.
Studies on metacognition of emotion recognition have shown that we do know when we correctly recognise particular emotional states in others, but it remains unknown whether we are similarly able to do it for our own emotions. My projects aims at developing a behavioral task to quantify these "metaemotional" skills, by use of an affective picture viewing task with confidence ratings, plus EEG, pupillometry, and ECG recordings. This will allow me to compare to what extent subjective reports of emotion and brain- and bodily- correlates of emotion align, and how this relates to confidence data, indicative of metacognitive skills.
In addition, I am also interested into what psychological traits or socio demographic factors may be related to accurate recognition of our emotional states.

Besides my work at the lab, I occasionally do science communication, graphic design, or both combined ;)