Hi, I'm Joy.
I'm an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of experimental psychology, social cognition, and emerging technologies. I'm particularly interested in how people experience, understand, and respond to one another, and how immersive technologies can help us investigate cognition, emotion, and behaviour.
I hold a PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Auckland, with co-supervision from Psychological Medicine. My doctoral research explored the use of a virtual reality compassion meditation to support emotional regulation and recovery from empathic distress.
My broader research interests span empathy and compassion, embodied cognition, contemplative science, and human-computer interaction.
I'm currently seeking postdoctoral opportunities with interdisciplinary teams that bring together behavioural and psychophysiological methods to investigate cognition, emotion, and subjective experience.
Learn More About Me
Publications
Gerry, L. J., Billinghurst, M., & Broadbent, E. (2022, March). Empathic skills training in virtual reality: a scoping review. In 2022 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW) (pp. 227-232). IEEE.Tikka, P., McNamara, R. G., Gerry, L. J., Kosunen, I., & Kaipainen, M. (2021). Designing enactive co-presence: Second-order simulation of empathy for artificial humans in narrative contexts. Presence: Virtual and Augmented Reality, 30, 149-166.
Gerry, L. J., Dahl, S., & Serafin, S. (2019). ADEPT: Exploring the Design, Pedagogy, and Analysis of a Mixed Reality Application for Piano Training. Sound and Music Computing 2019.
Schoeller, F., Zenasni, F., Bertrand, P., Gerry, L. J., Jain, A., & Horowitz, A. H. (2018). Combining virtual reality and biofeedback to foster empathic abilities in humans. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2741.
Gerry, L.J., Ens, B., Drogemuller, A., Thomas, B. & Billinghurst, M. (2017). Levity: A Virtual Reality system that responds to cognitive load. CHI 2018 Late Breaking Work.
Gerry, L.J. (2017). Paint with me: Stimulating creativity and empathy while painting with a painter in virtual reality. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 23(4). DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2017.2657239.
Høeg, E. R., Gerry, L., Thomsen, L. A., Nilsson, N. C., & Serafin, S. (2017). Binaural Sound Reduces Reaction Time in a Virtual Reality Search Task. In 2017 IEEE 3rd VR Workshop on Sonic Interactions for Virtual Environments.
Portfolio
Below are videos of various research projects I have designed and developed.