RESEARCH THEMES
Our on-going and past research is united by a set of common questions about how emotions are instantiated by the brain and body and how they unfold within the context of human culture. As a result, our Current Projects use a shared set of tools from psychology, neuroscience, and psychophysiology to investigate the processes at the core of human emotions. We are interested in how these processes may vary across the lifespan and in health versus wellness.
THE brain basis of emotions
A major emphasis of our research is on understanding how the rich variety of human experiences emerge from the brain. Our research has revealed that emotions are supported by broad scale neural networks spanning the whole brain. These networks are thought to support very basic mental processes (representing body changes, memory and knowledge, deploying attention) that together help comprise emotions. Our current research is supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Mind and Life Foundation and examines how these networks combine to create emotional experiences, well-being, and adaptive emotional decisions.
THE ROLE OF THE Body IN emotion
Another major emphasis of our research concerns the role of the peripheral body in emotions. Our research has shown that a person’s awareness of their bodily sensations—or what is known as interoception—influences the intensity of their emotional experiences. Our findings reveal that even purportedly "non-emotional" feelings such as hunger or immune system responses alter a person’s on-going emotional experiences. Our on-going research supported by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health examines how individual differences in interoception and the brain’s representation of the body contribute to emotion, how these relationships change across the early and late parts of the lifespan, and how they contribute to health and well-being.
Developmental VARIATION
Our research is guided by the hypothesis that the processes that contribute to emotions are not static across the lifespan. Our research has shown that the neural network configurations that are associated with emotion differ in younger versus older adulthood, for instance. Our on-going research supported by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health examines how developmental variation in the neurophysiology supporting emotions and in the social contexts humans inhabit both contribute to lifespan variation in emotions. Collectively, our research examines variation in emotional processes from preschool to late adulthood.
EMOTIONS ARE SITUATED IN CULTURE
A final arm of research examines how the neurobiology of emotion unfolds within and is shaped by human social contexts and culture. Our work has shown that accessibility to a culture’s emotion concepts via language influences emotional experiences, perceptions of emotions in others’ faces, and the neural representation of emotion. Our on-going research supported by the National Science Foundation examines how a person’s cultural origin and beliefs about their culture’s norms influences the neural basis of emotion. Our newer work is using “big data” approaches from computational linguistics to examine how emotion categories are represented across languages and across human history.