This program of research tests the hypothesis that the mental states we call emotion are psychologically constructed, or composed of more fundamental psychological ingredients. We have demonstrated that emotion can be constructed by manipulating people's affective states and their accessibility to knowledge of emotion in the laboratory. We are currently investigating the psychophysiology of constructed emotion and the broad-scale brain networks involved in constructed emotion. The implications of this model of emotion are that what you know influences what you feel and that context matters in emotion.
This line of work explores the influence of language in emotion perception. We have demonstrated across several studies that disrupting a person's ability to access the meaning of an emotion word like "anger" makes it more difficult to see anger on someone else's face. We are currently exploring language's influence on emotion perception in a patient population. This work is being conducted in collaboration with Dr. Brad Dickerson.
In this project, we employ a meta-analytic technique to assess the brain regions consistently activated across neuroimaging studies of emotion and affect. Our goal is to understand which brain regions support and implement emotion and to determine whether such regions correspond directly to discrete emotion categories (anger, sadness, fear) or to broader psychological ingredients like affect, conceptual knowledge, executive control, etc., which are not themselves specific to emotion. This work is being conducted in collaboration with Dr. Tor Wager.
This line of work explores the nature of people's representational system for emotion knowledge. This research is based on the hypothesis that language helps ground category knowledge and that knowledge is represented by situated simulations of prior perceptual experiences (e.g., visual represntations of previously encountered angry faces). In this view, someone knows what "anger" is in part because he simulates a prior experience of anger or a previously seen angry face. This line of work is being conducted in collaboration with Dr. Larry Barsalou.