Psychology in Dialogue on: Emotions

Hosted by the Department of Psychology, Psychology in Dialogue promotes interdisciplinary conversations on topics at the intersection of biological, psychological and socio-cultural research. This year, Psychology in Dialogue discusses the role of emotions in behavior, mental health & society with speakers representing research in psychology, neuroscience, political science and the humanities.

Schedule:

8:30 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. Breakfast

8:45 a.m. to 8:50 a.m. Welcome

8:50 a.m. to 9 a.m. Introductory remarks

9 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. Anna E.F. Weinberg, McGill University (Keynote lecture)

Talk title:

Measuring emotion in the body: Lessons from fear and anxiety

Abstract: In recent decades, affective science, or the scientific study of emotions, has become increasingly prominent in the field of psychology. Dr. Weinberg's work uses psychophysiological approaches, or research into the ways in which psychological processes are expressed physiologically, to study both basic affective processes, as well as the ways in which individuals differ in their emotional experiences. In this talk, Dr. Weinberg will review some history in the field of affective science, with a focus on psychophysiological approaches, and the study of the psychophysiology of fear and anxiety.

9:45 a.m. to 9:55 a.m. Q&A

9:55 a.m. to 10:10 a.m.  Coffee break

10:10 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.: Mihaela Iordanova, Concordia

Talk title:

Neural circuits of fear time travel

Abstract: The study of the neurobiology of fear has historically focused on cues that are directly paired with an aversive event (primary fear cues). However, fear can propagate backward and forward in time to other, secondary cues that are never directly paired with the aversive event but instead are paired with the primary fear cues. It is through this higher-order associative link that secondary cues are able to elicit fear. This talk will discuss how fear propagates across the memory network and offer an example approach of how the field of behavioral neuroscience studies the neural substrates of learned fear.

10:30 a.m. -10:50 a.m. Erin Barker, Concordia 

Talk title:

Emotion regulation across the life course

Abstract: Starting in infancy, emotions are regulated through transactional processes between children and caregivers. Across childhood and adolescence, transactional processes elaborate into and shape individual emotion regulation capacity. Emotion regulation capacity continues to develop across the transition into and through adulthood. What constitutes adaptive regulation of emotions at a given age is context-dependent and can be inferred from one’s subjective reports of well-being and more objective indicators of success. This talk will review research from developmental science on patterns of emotional experience, regulation, and associated outcomes across the life course.

10:50 a.m.to 11:10 a.m. Kimberley Manning, Concordia

Talk title: Emotions and affect in revolutionary struggle

Abstract: Although the discipline of Political Science has long been at odds with the role of emotions in the study of politics, recent scholarship suggests that there is much analytical power to be gained through exploring how emotion shapes political discourse and behavior. Building on the social movement literature on emotions and feminist scholarship on affect, this talk will discuss the role of emotions in revolutionary struggle, with a particular focus on the earliest years of the People’s Republic of China

11:10 a.m. to 11:20 a.m. Coffee break

11:20a.m. to 11:40a.m. Omri Moses, Concordia

Talk title:

Emotions as cultural practices: A view from the humanities

Abstract: Over the last two decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have begun to formulate embodied and social constructivist theories of the emotions (Damasio, Feldman Barrett) that are more congenial to literary critics. These new scientific views give a special role to the physical and cultural environment in shaping our emotions. Literary critics and cultural critics have taken up these theories through the lens of their own methodological preoccupations. They ask whether literary texts can serve as distinctive sites of cultural training in the emotions and, if so, how they might succeed in activating and altering patterns of emotional response. However, some of these critics find fault in the broad approach to the emotions in the psychological sciences, which they perceive to be tacitly dualistic and functionalist in orientation—i.e., preoccupied with how brains use the body and the external environment to accomplish basic tasks, implement generally recognized needs and values, and thus pursue reasonable outcomes. By contrast, critics in the humanities prefer to view emotions as cultural practices, dynamic patterns of interaction that exist in spaces of cultural conflict (Ahmed, Wetherell, Ngai, Herman). They are not interior cognitive states, and they unfold in the collaborative context of a narrative or situation, which we must confront to interpret the resulting behavior. This talk surveys some of the ways that affect theory in the humanities has invoked literary texts to question universalizing assumptions and normative expectations about emotional responses in the mind sciences, explore states of emotional ambivalence, and privilege surprising or novel reactions to events. Dr. Moses will be delving into emergent preoccupations of cognitive literary critics, drawing attention to phenomenological aspects of the feelings and emotions that literary reading creates, which are lost when we examine them in narrowly instrumental terms.

11:40 a.m. to 12 p.m. Panel discussion

12 p.m. to 12:10 p.m. Q&A

12:10 p.m. to 12:15 p.m. Concluding remarks

Speakers:

Anna E.F. Weinberg, Ph.D., McGill University (Keynote lecture) Dr. Weinberg is an Associate Professor of Psychology at McGill University, where she conducts research on the biological pathways that give rise to disordered emotional experience. This involves using multiple methodologies, such as event-related potentials (ERPs), to examine the activity of neural systems devoted to processing errors, emotional stimuli, and rewards, and working to establish reliable links between the function of these systems and behavior in healthy populations. With this basic research as a foundation, Dr. Weinberg seeks to identify changes in the systems that characterize emotional dysfunction in a range of mood and anxiety (i.e., internalizing) disorders.

Mihaela Iordanova, Ph.D., Concordia University. Dr. Iordanova is an Associate Professor at Concordia University, a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Behavioural Neuroscience, and a co-director of the Centre for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology. Her research focuses on uncovering the behavioural and neurobiological mechanisms of appetitive and aversive learning as well as their interaction using high-density in vivo electrophysiological recordings, computational and machine learning algorithms, and opto- and chemo-genetics. In 2020 she won the Canadian Association for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award and in 2023 the Pavlovian Society Research Award.

Erin Barker, Ph.D., Concordia University. Dr. Barker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and member of the Centre for Research in Human Development at Concordia University, where she directs the Lifespan Well-Being Laboratory. She is a developmental scientist whose program of research examines patterns of emotional experience across developmental transitions. She is particularly interested in how stress and coping affect mental health and wellbeing during the transition to adulthood. Dr. Barker completed her graduate training at the Universities of Victoria and Alberta and postdoctoral fellowships in the US at the National Institutes of Health and University of Wisconsin.

Kimberley Manning, Ph.D., Concordia University. Dr. Manning is the Principal of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute and Professor of Political Science at Concordia University. Dr. Manning’s research focuses on mid-century women’s leadership in the People’s Republic of China and the advocacy of parents of transgender children and youth in contemporary Canada.

Omri Moses, Ph.D., Concordia University. Dr. Moses is an Associate Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal, where he teaches courses on literary and visual modernism as well as the scientific humanities. He is the author of Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life (Stanford UP, 2014) and is working on a new book project, The Open Mind, which examines theories of extended cognition to understand better how we read fiction and poetry, while also turning to literature to test these new neurobiological theories.