Emotion, Elicitation and Expression (E3 Lab)

Research Fields

Understanding emotions, particularly their evolution, history, their place in our societies, and their effects on cognition and behavior has fascinated some of the greatest thinkers such as Aristotle, Descartes or Darwin. How are our emotions born? How do we measure them? How do we control them? What are their functions? How do they influence knowledge? A young research field – Affective Sciences – has set out to discern the nature and functions of emotions. Our research group studies emotions through this approach, from an interdisciplinary perspective and by using a variety of experimental methods.

A first line of our research aims to understand the psychological and cerebral processes that trigger an emotion. The same stimulus can provoke opposite emotions in two different people, or even within the same person at different moments in time. Indeed, goals, needs, values, social inferences and more generally, motivations, can greatly vary depending on the person but also the period in an individual’s life. An emotion is born from the interaction between a motivation and an event. To study emotion elicitation, we use visual, audio, or olfactory stimuli which allow us to induce emotional reactions.

The second line of our research aims to analyze such emotional reactions. We can thus measure the physiological reactions of the peripheral nervous system. This includes, for example, cardiac acceleration, sweating, and blushing. We are also interested in the muscular expression of the face as well as the voice and even of the posture. The emotional response is also characterized by an action tendency which prepares the individual to react. For instance, fear prepares the organism to avoid danger whereas anger prepares the organism to attack. Finally, the last component we study is known as the subjective feeling that corresponds to the conscious experience of an emotion, which can be labeled (“I am happy” or “I am sad”) and allows us to verbally communicate our emotions to others. To analyze the emotional response, we use measures relating to behavior, peripheral physiology, and cerebral activity.

The third line of our research relates to the effects emotion has on the processes allowing for the acquisition, organization and utilization of knowledge. Thus, we study the way our emotions influence and modify our attention, memory and decision-making processes.