Professor Eric Vanman

Professor

School of Psychology
Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences
e.vanman@psy.uq.edu.au
+61 7 336 56213

Overview

Eric J. Vanman is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland Australia. After receiving his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Southern California in 1994, he was a post-doctoral fellow in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience at USC and then spent a year as a research scientist at Texas A&M University. He was then a lecturer at Emory University until his appointment as an Assistant Professor at Georgia State University in 2000. He left Georgia State in 2007 as an Associate Professor to take up his current position. His research interests include the social neuroscience of emotion and intergroup prejudice, and his studies have incorporated several kinds of psychophysiological and neuroimaging methods.

Research Interests

  • Why Do We Cry? How Do People Respond to Others Who are Crying?
    We are currently investigating the functions of crying by asking people to cry in the laboratory and taking various behavioural and physiological measurements while they do. In other studies, participants view pictures or videos of people who are crying to examine how we respond to those showing tears.
  • How Do I Know I Can Trust You?
    Several factors influence our judgments of the trustworthiness of strangers, including facial features, their group memberships, and their emotional expressions. Our research includes measuring physiological and neural activity while participants look at pictures of strangers who vary in their perceived trustworthiness.
  • How Stressful is it to Use Social Media?
    We have studied how constantly keeping up with friends via social media such as Facebook can have both positive and negative benefits. We found in once recent study, for example, that giving up Facebook for five days was associated with negative feelings about being socially disconnected, but stress (as measured via salivary cortisol) decreased during the same time period.
  • Why Do We Have Less Empathy for People in Other Groups?
    It is well known now that we naturally have less empathy for people who belong to different social groups to our own. This line of research investigates some of the reasons why such empathic biases occur.
  • How Do We Really Feel About Robots?
    Can we have empathy for robots? Why do we fear them? Is it a good idea to design robots that look like humans? This is the newest line of research in our laboratory.

Research Impacts

Dr. Vanman is perhaps best known for his research on racial prejudice, in which participants’ facial EMG activity (i.e., activation of frowning and smiling muscles, in the absence of detectable facial displays of emotion) has been found to be related to prejudice and discriminatory behavior. His work on unconscious bias displayed via psychophysiological measures was among a few early studies that laid the groundwork for research on implicit measures that has dominated this research area for the last decade. More recently, he has used a social neuroscience approach to study the mechanisms of empathy, including factors that might lead to a failure of empathy for others who are different to us.

Qualifications

  • Doctor of Philosophy, University of Southern California
  • Masters (Coursework), University of Southern California

Publications

View all Publications

Publications

Book

Book Chapter

  • Vanman, Eric J. (2024). The intragroup level: moral emotions, empathy, and acceptance of others as ingroup members—a social neuroscience perspective. The Routledge international handbook of the psychology of morality. (pp. 168-178) edited by Naomi Ellemers, Stefano Pagliaro and Félice van Nunspeet. London, United Kingdom: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781003125969-26

  • McGovern, Hugh T. and Vanman, Eric J. (2022). Gene by environment interactions in intergroup relations. The neuroscience of intergroup relations: global perspectives on the neural underpinnings of intergroup behaviour, ingroup bias and prejudice. (pp. 76-94) edited by Pascal Molenberghs. Abingdon, Oxon, United Kingdom: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781003042426-6

  • Kappas, Arvid, Stower, Rebecca and Vanman, Eric J. (2020). Communicating with robots: what we do wrong and what we do right in artificial social intelligence, and what we need to do better. Social intelligence and nonverbal communication. (pp. 233-254) edited by Robert J. Sternberg and Aleksandra Kostić. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-34964-6_8

  • Vanman, Eric J. and Philipp, Michael C. (2019). Physiological Measures. Advanced Research Methods for the Social and Behavioral Sciences. (pp. 147-167) edited by John E Edlund and Austin Lee Nichols. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

  • Tassinary, Louis G., Cacioppo, John T. and Vanman, Eric J. (2017). The somatic system. Handbook of Psychophysiology. (pp. 151-182) edited by John T. Cacioppo, Louis G. Tassinary and Gary G. Berntson. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/9781107415782.008

  • Owren, Michael J., Philipp, Michael, Vanman, Eric, Trivedi, Niyati, Schulman, Allison and Bachorowski, Jo-Anne (2013). Understanding spontaneous human laughter: the role of voicing in inducing positive emotion. Evolution of emotional communication: from sounds in nonhuman mammals to speech and music in man. (pp. 175-190) edited by Eckart Altenmuller, Sabine Schmidt and Elke Zimmermann. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

  • Tassinary, L. G., Cacioppo, J. T. and Vanman, E. J. (2007). The skeletomotor system: Surface electromyography. Handbook of Psychophysiology. (pp. 267-299) edited by J. T. Cacioppo, L. G. Tassinary and G. G. Berntson. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Journal Article

Conference Publication

  • Bartholow, Bruce D., Berntson, Gary G., Bosch, Jos, Burleson, Mary, Hawkley, Louise C., Ito, Tiffany A., Larsen, Jeff T., Norman, Greg J., Norris, Catherine J., Quigley, Karen S., Tassinary, Louis G. and Vanman, Eric (2018). On giving more light than heat: The life and contributions of John T. Cacioppo (1951-2018). 58th Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, Quebec City Canada, 3-7 October 2018. Hoboken, NJ United States: Wiley-Blackwell.

  • Grainger, S., Henry, J., Vanman, E., Scott, J. and Labuschagne, I. (2016). Intranasal Oxytocin and Social Perceptual Processing in Late Adulthood. -, -, -. Cary, NC United States: Oxford University Press.

  • Vanman, Eric J., Johnstone, Kyah and Vartanian, Lenny R. (2014). Compassion (Or the Lack of It) When It Comes to Weight: a Facial Emg Study. 54h Annual Meeting of the Society-for-Psychophysiological-Research, Atlanta Ga, Sep 10-14, 2014. HOBOKEN: WILEY-BLACKWELL.

  • Vanman, Eric J., Horiguchi, Mari and Sharman, Leah (2013). The social function of tears in crying: a facial electromyographic investigation. 53rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, Florence Italy, 02 - 06 October 2013. Hoboken, NJ United States: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, Inc.. doi: 10.1111/psyp.12120

  • Philipp, Michael C., Bernstein, Michael, Vanman, Eric J. and Johnston, Lucy (2012). Adaptive facial mimicry to social exclusion. 52nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, New Orleans La, 19-23 September 2012. Hoboken, NJ United States: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2012.01440.x

  • Vanman, Eric J., Horiguchi, Mari, Philipp, Michael and Johnston, Lucy (2012). What is the role of mimicry in detecting posed and genuine smiles?. 52nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, New Orleans La, 19-23 September 2012. Hoboken, NJ United States: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2012.01437.x

  • Henrion, M. and Vanman, E.J. (2010). Feeling bad about what "we" have done: the p300 as a marker of collective guilt in an intergroup transgression. 50th Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, Portland, OR, U.S.A., 29 September-3 October, 2010. Malden, MA, U.S.A.: Blackwell Publishing. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2010.01111.x

  • Vanman, EJ, Iyer, A, Henrion, M, Witowski, P, Berndt, SL, Greenaway, KH and Hornsey, MJ (2010). Images of terrorism: The emotional impact of viewing scenes of the aftermath. 50th Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, Portland, OR, U.S.A., 29 September-3 October, 2010. Malden, MA, U.S.A.: Blackwell Publishing. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2010.01111.x

Other Outputs

PhD and MPhil Supervision

Current Supervision

Completed Supervision