Topics

The Center’s research is organized into the following five themes :

LEARNING AND EDUCATION

Emotions influence what and how we learn because they have a direct impact on motivation, attention, and memory. For example, our researchers have helped demonstrate that we automatically attend to objects or events that carry emotional value, such as the human face and voice, babies, food, and spiders.

Research has also shown that (Read more…)

CULTURE AND THE ARTS

Emotions are the products of evolution and also depend heavily on culture, which strongly influences what we feel and how we express it. The way we talk about our feelings reveals crucial details about the way emotions are conceptualized and how these conceptions have crystallized in different emotion theories throughout history. For example, our researchers analyze the writers of the past, whose reflections on emotional life are informative for contemporary theories of emotion.

The researchers at the Center study (Read more...)

HEALTH AND WELL-BEING

Emotions have a strong impact on our well-being. Researchers at the Center have shown, for example, that negative emotions caused by an imbalance between work and family life can lead to musculoskeletal pain. In turn, physical pain is not only an unpleasant bodily state, but it is also detrimental to psychological well-being. This close link between the physical and the psychological is also attested by the finding that pain is processed by brain areas similar to those for disgust and unfairness, suggesting a common ground in the human brain for moral and physical distress.

In the field of mental health, our (Read more...)

VALUES AND DECISION MAKING

Emotions influence most of our decisions andhelp us discern what is important in our environment. They should not be ignored but, rather, understood.

Emotions are particularly influential in the moral realm. They guide (Read more...)

INTERPERSONAL COMPETENCES AND SOCIAL SKILLS

Emotions play a major role in our social interactions. Part of what makes us emotionally competent in society is being able to infer how others are feeling and getting our emotions across. Our Center investigates the nonverbal channels people use – consciously or not – to communicate emotions. These channels include the face, the voice, and body movements, each with (Read more...)