The Emotion Research Network links emotions researchers across Penn State University. Faculty, post-docs, and grad students from Human Development, The College of Communications, School of Information Science and Technology, Smeal College of Business, and the College of the Liberal Arts participate. For more information see our webpage http://psych.la.psu.edu/ERN/index.html

The Department of Psychology at Boston College has a vibrant group of emotion researchers in several different disciplines.  Our graduate program has three research concentrations: Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience (CABN), with concentrated study the neural and cognitive processes that underlie motivation, learning and memory, emotion, language, and perception; Social and Cultural Psychology (SCP) with concentrated study of social and cultural processes, with an emphasis on the role that emotion plays in each;  and Developmental Psychology (DP), with a focus on  studying social, emotional, and cognitive development across the life span.  Our department also has an interdisciplinary training program on Emotion (for details, see http://tinymce.moxiecode.cp/mce_temp_url  and  http://tinymce.moxiecode.cp/mce_temp_url ).  Faculty in the Emotion Training Program include: 

Lisa Feldman Barrett: Dr. Barrett's research investigates the psychological and neurobiological processes involved in generating the experience of emotion. In particular, she is interested in the role of affective processing and conceptual knowledge (including language) for emotion in the experience of emotion.

Elizabeth Kensinger:  Dr. Kensinger's research combines behavioral and brain imaging techniques to understand the processes used to remember information with emotional importance. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding how emotion affects the subjective vividness and accuracy of memory. She also is interested in identifying how emotion's influence on memory changes across the adult lifespan. 

James Russell:   Dr. Russell's research deals with the fundamental question of how emotions can be described and then assessed. Some specific ideas pursued are a circumplex model of emotion, a prototype theory of emotion concepts, which leads to the idea that specific emotions are understood in terms of scripts, a defence of the traditional view that displeasure is the opposite of pleasure, a skeptical review of the traditional view that basic emotions are universally and easily recognized from facial expressions. More recently, the question has arisen of how these various ideas fit together within a larger framework. An analysis is being developed called "the psychological construction of emotion." 

Maya Tamir: Dr. Tamir's research integrates theories in emotion and social cognition to explore the nature and functional basis of emotion regulation. Her research explores whether and how individuals learn about the cognitive and behavioral implications of their affective states. She is also interested in the ways in which the implications of emotions and their link to self-regulation vary as a function of individual differences. 

Other faculty in our department study related topics of interest, including Karen Rosen, (attachment and social development), Jon Horvitz (the role of brain dopamine activity in learning and motivation), Michael Numan (the neurobiology of mammalian maternal behavior), and Scott Slotnick (the nature of visual memory and visual awareness).

Located in scenic Blacksburg, Virginia, Virginia Tech's Developmental and Biological Psychology program is dedicated to the training of tomorrow's research psychologists.  Our program integrates developmental lifespan and biological perspectives on issues important to understanding human behavior, ranging from gene action to complex social relationships.  We conduct research with infants, toddlers, school age children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly.  We welcome applications from students who appreciate the exciting and important implications of such research for the future of human psychological science.  Our faculty members are:

Martha Ann Bell (infants, toddlers, preschoolers, school age)
"Frontal lobe development from both behavioral and electrophysiological viewpoints
"Developmental change in brain-behavior relations in memory, inhibitory control, emotion regulation, and attention

Kirby Deater-Deckard (preschoolers, school age, preadolescents)
"Adaptive and maladaptive child and adolescent social-emotional and cognitive development
"Gene-environment processes; behavioral genetics
"Parenting; parent-child relationships

Julie Dunsmore (preschoolers, school age, preadolescents)
"Parents' emotional communication, especially in regard to positive emotions
"Parents' beliefs about children's emotions across culture
"Children's social cognition, affective social competence, and prosocial behavior

Bruce Friedman (adults)
"Psychophysiology of emotion and personality
"Relationships between anxiety and cardiovascular activity
"Autonomic components of depression and hostility
Jungmeen Kim (preadolescents, adolescents, adults, elderly)
"Social and personality development; dynamic relationships among personality
"social relationships, relationship stress, and psychological well-being across the life span
"Risk and resilience in development; family and peer relations as risk and protective factors

Robin Panneton (infants)
"Perception of speech during infancy, including different aspects of language (phonemes, words, accents) and perception of emotion in voices
"Psychophysiology of infant attention to speech
"Multimodal influences on early language learning

Emotion is one of the most intensively studied topics in the Psychology Department at the University of Virginia. Faculty members in several areas conduct collaborative research and teach courses related to the emotions, including:

Social Area:

Jerry Clore:

Research related to emotion: The connection between emotion and cognition. Our work focuses on the whole cycle of how conscious and unconscious perception and cognition trigger emotion, and how such self-produced moods and emotions then inform judgments, decisions, memory, and cognitive processing.

Courses with emotion content: Seminar on Emotion and Cognition

 

Jonathan Haidt:

Research related to emotion: The moral emotions, including moral elevation, moral disgust, awe, admiration, and gratitude.  The role of emotions in guiding moral judgment. The psychophysiology of the moral emotions, particularly the role of oxytocin and the vagus nerve.

Courses with emotion content: Morality and the moral emotions; cultural psychology; positive psychology

 

Shige Oishi:

Research related to emotion: culture, personality, and emotion.

Courses with emotion content: "subjective well-being," "culture and personality"

 

Timothy Wilson:

Research related to emotion: Affective forecasting: The nature and accuracy of people's predictions about their future affective states. Affective adaptation:  The processes by which affective reactions attenuate over time.

Courses with emotion content:  Self-knowledge and the adaptive unconscious.  This course is about unconscious processing and how people come to know themselves.  Am important component of both questions is emotional processes; e.g., the question of whether emotions can be unconscious, and how people know their own emotional states.

 

Clinical Area:

James Coan:

Research related to emotion: Neural bases of emotional expression, experience and regulation.  Neural bases of the social regulation of emotion.  Behavior coding, electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and peripheral psychophysiology.

Courses with emotion content: Affective Neuroscience

 

Bethany Teachman:

Research related to emotion: Fear and anxiety disorders, including cognitive biases during emotion dysregulation, development of anxiety problems, and change over treatment; Implicit affective associations and their relationship to psychopathology; Intersection of disgust and fear in pathological anxiety

Courses with emotion content: Fear and Anxiety seminar; Abnormal Psychology; Experimental Psychopathology (graduate class in clinical psychology); Intervention (graduate class in clinical psychology)

 

For more information please see:

http://www.virginia.edu/psychology/

MSc Psychological Research Methods in the Study of Emotion

Emotion is a fascinating and interdisciplinary topic that is of renewed interest within Psychology and a strong research area at University of Portsmouth. Building on the success of the Psychology Department’s internationally recognised Centre for the Study of Emotion, this pathway provides an ESRC-recognised MSc research training programme.  Students are taught by experienced researchers based in a department with extensive research facilities, including new psychophysiological, observation, and interview laboratories. Students successfully completing this pathway will gain the skills and techniques required for further study or a career in scientific research, and develop confidence and competence in tackling research problems while conducting a emotion-based thesis project.  The course is expected to appeal to suitably qualified professionals, to postgraduates with applied interests, as well as to postgraduates intending to go on to study for a PhD at Portsmouth or elsewhere.

 

 

Emotion Researchers and people involved in teaching on the Emotion unit at Psychology Deaprtment, Univeristy of Portsmouth, Portsmouth England:

Dr. Kim A. Bard

Dr. Vasu Reddy

Dr. Paul Morris

Dr. Bridget Waller

Dr. Edel Ennis

Dr. Maggie Linnell

Dr. Joerg Zinken

Dr. Adrian Needs

Dr. Endre Kadar

Dr. Sherria Hoskins

Dr. Hartmut Blank

Prof Chris Sinha

Visiting Professor Cintia Rodriguez

Sid Carter

The Psychology Department at the University of California, Davis, offers a wealth of opportunities for training in emotion.  We have a large, active, and diverse set of researchers studying emotion at multiple levels of analysis, from neural to socio-cultural processes.  UC Davis students interested in emotion are eligible for 3-year fellowships available through an NIH-Funded multi-university training program in Affective Science (administered with Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC San Francisco).  The following UC Davis faculty conduct research on emotion:

 David Amaral       

http://sandtiger.dbs.ucdavis.edu/FacultyProfiles/Centers/CenterForNeuroscience/DisplayFacultyProfile.cfm?ResearcherID=950

(Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Center for Neuroscience. Ph.D., University of Rochester, 1977)
Neurobiology of memory and emotion; amygdala function  

Jennifer Beer  

http://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu/content/Labs/Beer/        

(Assistant Professor, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2002)
Self, emotion, social functioning, social cognition, social cognitive neuroscience  

John Capitanio          

http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/Capitanio/ 

(Professor, Ph.D., University of California, Davis, 1982)
Primate social relationships and personality, psychoneuroimmunology  Rand Conger         

http://hcd.ucdavis.edu/faculty/rconger/rconger.html 

(Professor, Ph.D., University of Washington, 1976)
Adolescent development, depression, family processes

 Robert Emmons          

http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Emmons/

(Professor, Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1986)
Positive psychology, personality and religion, goals and motivation, gratitude and well-being  

Kristin Lagattuta          

 http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Lagattuta/

(Assistant Professor, Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1999)
Children's knowledge about thinking and emotion; theory of mind 

Richard Maddock          

http://sandtiger.dbs.ucdavis.edu/FacultyProfiles/Centers/CenterForNeuroscience/DisplayFacultyProfile.cfm?ResearcherID=852

(Professor, M.D., UC Davis, School of Medicine, 1982)
Emotion-cognition interactions, emotional memory, emotional disorders  

Sally Mendoza       

http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Mendoza/

(Research Psychologist, Ph.D., Stanford University, 1978)
Primate social relationships and personality, behavioral neuroendocrinology 

Richard Robins          

http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/faculty/robins/

(Professor, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1995)
Self-conscious emotions; self-evaluative processes; personality 

Phillip Shaver          

 http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Shaver/

(Distinguished Professor, Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1970)
Close relationships, attachment theory, emotion  

Ross Thompson          

http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Thompson/

(Professor, Ph.D., University of Michigan 1981)
Early social and personality development; relational influences on emotion understanding, emotional regulation, and self-understanding

Faculty specializing in emotion include Jessica Tracy, Jonathan Schooler, and Liz Dunn www.psych.ubc.ca