Emotion

The focus of this study is to learn more about the way adults and children understand emotion expressions in others.  Through careful data collection and analysis of a wide variety of ‘emotion expressive’ behaviors across cultures, we hope to identify universal patterns as well as cultural variations in this behavior. In order to answer these questions, we hope to conduct micro-analysis on data consisting of emotion expressive behaviors such as facial and vocal expressions, as well as body language.

Project 1 and 2

In order to learn more about emotion production and understanding across cultures, we will collect video displays of emotions in various cultures and then present these samples to individuals in a controlled setting.  We will request that participants provide a label for each emotion.  In addition, we will systematically vary the video clips in order to determine what aspect of the video is contributing to participants’ response and whether this varies with culture. 

Project 3

To further explore how early experiences and interactions may affect the development of emotion processing or comprehension, we will also examine early caregiver-infant interactions in a natural setting.  Specifically, participants will be observed systematically for a fixed duration over several weeks and video recorded for subsequent analysis. The goal of this project is to explore the quality and quantity of face-to-face interaction across different cultural environments as well as challenge some of the current theoretical positions which emphasize the need for a specific ‘Industrialized’ interaction for healthy emotion development. 

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