about us
We are a team of psychologists, physiologists, and neuroscientists who study how the brain creates emotions. The Affective Science Lab is directed by Dr. Kristen Lindquist at The Ohio State University, although our lab team spans Ohio State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Our on-going work examines the psychological and neural mechanisms of emotional experiences, perceptions of emotions in others, and how emotional phenomena drive social behavior and decision making. We also examine how these processes change across the lifespan—from early childhood to late adulthood—and how they interact with the social contexts people experience in every day life to influence health and wellness. Collectively, our work reveals that emotions are embodied phenomena that are also deeply situated in culture.
All our research projects are united by a set of common questions about how emotions are instantiated by the brain and body and how they unfold within the context of human culture. Read on for core questions addressed by the lab or visit our Current Projects.
THE brain basis of emotions
Over the past decade, our research has revealed that emotions are supported by large-scale neural networks spanning the whole brain. These networks support very basic mental processes that are not specific to emotions (representing body changes, memory and knowledge, deploying attention), but functionally connect to produce experiences of anger, anxiety, and other emotions. Our current research on the brain basis of emotions is supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Mind and Life Foundation and examines how these networks function to contribute to mental well-being and adaptive emotional decisions from childhood through old age.
THE ROLE OF THE Body IN emotion
Our research has shown that the body is more than passingly involved in emotional experiences. Our findings reveal that a person’s sense of their bodily sensations—or what is known as interoception—influences the intensity of their emotional experiences. We have shown that even purportedly "non-emotional" feelings such as hunger or immune system reactivity to pathogens alter a person’s on-going emotional experiences. Our on-going research supported by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health examines how individual differences in interoception and the brain’s representation of the body contribute to emotion. We are interested in how these relationships change across the early and late parts of the lifespan, and how they contribute to health and well-being.
Developmental VARIATION
Our findings reveal that the mental, biological, and social processes that contribute to emotions are not static across the lifespan. For instance, our research has shown that the neural network configurations that are associated with emotion differ in young versus older adults. Our on-going research supported by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health examines how developmental variation in the neurophysiology supporting emotions and in the social contexts humans inhabit both contribute to lifespan variation in emotions. Collectively, our research examines variation in emotional processes from preschool to late adulthood.
EMOTIONS ARE SITUATED IN CULTURE
The neurobiology of emotion unfolds within, and is shaped by, human social contexts and culture. Our work has shown that accessibility to the emotion concepts most prominent in your culture influences how emotions are experienced, perceived in others’ faces, and represented by the brain. Our supported by the National Science Foundation examined how a person’s cultural origin and beliefs about their culture’s norms influences the neural basis of emotion. Our on-going research supported by the National Institute of Health examines how a person’s social world—from where they live to what beliefs they hold—influence emotions. Our newest work is using “big data” approaches from computational linguistics to examine how emotion categories are represented across languages and how that representation has changed across human history.