Wendy Berry Mendes, a psychologist at UC San Francisco, talks with June Gruber of Yale about her research linking emotion to bodily physiology. In this interview from Yale's Experts in Emotion Series, Mendes traces how she became interested in psychophysiology and walks through core findings from her lab, including how cardiovascular and stress reactivity relate to health outcomes and social context. She discusses methods for measuring physiological responses during emotional and social encounters, and what those measurements reveal about coping and threat versus challenge states. Near the end she speculates on where the field is heading and offers advice for students wanting to study emotion. The format is a structured conversation with chapter markers rather than a formal classroom lecture, but the content is substantive, covering roughly two decades of research on the mind-body connection in emotion science.