Research
The Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory is developing a systems-level model of the brain and body mechanisms underlying mental life, unifying human affect, emotion, motivation, cognition and action. Our current topics include:
- A predictive processing approach to understanding mind and brain, with a focus on metabolic processes, allostasis, and interoception
- The nature and dynamics of affective processing, including the structure of affect, the neurobiology of affect and how it changes with age and disease, individual differences in affective reactivity, and how affect supports memory and perception
- The theory of constructed emotion, including the conceptual system for emotion (how emotion knowledge is represented and structured in the mind and the brain) and the role of language and conceptual knowledge about emotion in constituting the experience and perception of emotion
- Allostasis, interoception, and metabolism. We are interested in how an organism regulates its biological variables to survive. We view this process as the major operating principle of a brain in a body.
- Sex differences in emotion, including the influence of ovarian hormones on brain connectivity, with corresponding changes in memory and experience
- The neuroscience of emotion from an evolutionary-developmental (evo-devo) perspective