ISSAS 2014

 Emotions meets action

Given the tymological roots of the world emotion ("move", "stir up"), it is odd to see how negligible the role of action is in current approaches to huma emotion. This summer school will examine the various ways in which emotion and action can be related by bringing together leading experts in the disciplines of the psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of emotion and the psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of action.

Questions include the role that action plays in emotion theories and the role that emotion plays in action theories.Once the foundation is laid, we focus on specific research topics for which there is already subtantial overlap in the various disciplines including goal relevance, goal-directed action, experancy, novelty, prediction error, control,(sense of) agency, effort, action tendencies, and affordances. To take integration among the various disciplines one step further, experts and students will actively try to build models that integrate insights from both emotion research and action research, and this way push future research toward new, unexplored avenues. The summer school also adresses overlap between emotion and action in fiction and music, and examines the role of emotions as reasons for action and decision making.

This summer school proposes to bring together and integrate the multiple and complementary ways of investigating the relations between emotion and action by presenting fundamental theories, major research paradigms,cutting-edge methodologies in the significant results from different disciplines. In addition, hands-on workshops will be conducted on research methodologies in the study of emotion and action from the vantage point of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. Students will be given the opportunity to put their freshly acquired knowledge to use by working din small groups, a process that will result in the procduction and presentation of an interdisciplinary research project.

The scientific coordination of the 2014 edition of ISSAS was carried out by Dr. Agnes Moors, who is associate professor at University of Leuven, visiting professor at Ghent University and associate member of the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences.