Speaker
Description
Understanding human emotion, its generation, expression or regulation has been a ‘hot-topic’ for millenia, and appears in many disciplines, such as philosophy, art, and literature. Yet, the scientific study from a psychological point of view has a relatively late start. Since emotions are complex phenomena, the psychological approches are divergent, as well, and can focus on social-cultural, cognitive or biological aspects. The neuroscientific approach to emotions has a dramatic growth over the past decades and has led to the birth of affective neuroscience. Affective neuroscience focuses on the neural bases of emotions. It investigates for example the role of emotions in information processing, individual differences in reactivity, and identifies brain networks for emotion generation, maintainance and regulation. During this lecture we will discuss some recent conceptual and methodological issues: What is the contribution of affective neuroscience to psychology? How can we select appropriate affective stimuli? And the ‘control’ stimuli? How many affective super-traits exist? What are the possible future directions? During the talk, we will answer these questions and present behavioral and brain activation results from our lab.
