Marianne LaFrance

Professor of Psychology and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Marianne LaFrance, B.A. University of Windsor, Canada, Ph.D. Boston University, faculty member at Yale since 1998: You are an international leader in the psychology of gender and a pioneer in the study of nonverbal communication. Your research has illuminated how nonverbal communication can reflect and reinforce social and structural differences in power, particularly between women and men. Your scholarship is theoretically sophisticated and empirically rigorous, and you communicate it in a way that is not only informative to researchers in psychology but also accessible to interdisciplinary and general audiences.

As a scholar, you have a unique talent for identifying how seemingly small behaviors have significant implications. You see the relationship between a particular behavior—a direct look or averted gaze, a shift in posture, a smile—and its broader impact. You remind us that there is no such thing as “not behaving”: even inaction has consequences. You have demonstrated that nonverbal behaviors, social interactive responses and expressions in language communicate and perpetuate power relations between individuals and groups. You have consistently directed the field to be more theoretically inclusive, studying and incorporating the perspectives of those outside the center of power in order to more fully understand human social behavior.

You are widely admired for your transformative contributions to the study of gender throughout your career. One of your most highly cited papers goes beyond definitively documenting that women smile more than men to explain when and why these differences occur. Characteristic of your attention to detail, you subsequently made foundational contributions in showing how micro-expressions, such as systematic differences in the form and duration of a smile, convey important social information, particularly with respect to gender relations. Your deep commitment to the social significance of research is reflected in how you regularly translate your scientific findings to books for broad audiences, exemplified by your recent book, Lip Service: Smiles in Life, Death, Trust, Lies, Work, Memory, Sex, and Politics.

All bias is not subtle, however. Your research on sexual harassment is classic in the field of social psychology. Understanding how women respond to experiences of sexual harassment—and when and why they do not—is clearly a timely issue with implications for psychology, gender studies, the general public, law and policy, and public discourse. Your scholarly interests have continually evolved: in a recent series of experiments you studied perceptions of and bias toward sexual minorities and transgender individuals. This is cutting-edge scholarship that expands the scope of work within the fields of psychology and gender studies.

The attention that you give to detail in the service of scholarship is also evident in your contributions as a teacher, mentor, and colleague. You hold your undergraduate and graduate students to high standards, and you engage and inspire them to meet or exceed those standards. Your colleagues in psychology, gender studies, and other communities within and beyond the university value you for your deep commitment to profession. Your openness and directness, coupled with your good humor, encouragement, and generosity, keep us on the course to excellence.

The world’s expert on smiles, you have a wonderful one yourself, full of the warmth and twinkle that makes you a highly regarded teacher, colleague, and friend. Partisan of Canada, land of your birth, world traveler, art collector, oenophile, and gourmande, in retirement we hope you look forward to continuing to apply the same high standards to travel, art, wine and restaurants that you always do to scholarship and your profession.