Lou Tassinary, professor of architecture and associate dean for research at the Texas A&M University College of Architecture, was elected secretary of the Society for Psychophysiological Research. His term runs through 2011. The SPR is the leading society dedicated to the research of how the mind and body work together.
As an experimental psychologist in a Department of Architecture, Tassinary is involved in a wide range of research activities. Currently, his work focuses on effects of different environments on stress reduction and recovery, the use of psychophysiological measures to track emotional processes during rapid decision making, the psychometric properties of facial electromyographic measures of emotion, and the development of computer graphic models of human faces and facial expressions.
Over the past few years Tassinary has worked with students on the theoretical and applied consequences of the perception and categorization of architectural forms, the design of restorative exterior environments for children with cancer and their families, the expression of gender in synthetic actors, the comparison of interactive color specification systems for human-computer interfaces, and the effects of front-yard landscaping on patterns of social interaction among neighbors.
In 1993, Tassinary received a Presidential Faculty Fellows Award.
