Understanding how the brain creates emotions can shed light on what emotions are, how they function, what goes awry in emotional disorders, and how they change across the lifespan. To address questions about the brain basis of emotion, my research uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) to “peer into” a healthy human brain as it creates emotions in real time.

Although common sense suggests that emotions are distinct types of mental states and that there are emotional “centers” in the brain, my research reveals that, in fact, emotions are the product of many more basic functions that are not unique to emotion per se. For instance, we show that there is increased activity in a set of brain networks that activate body changes, register body feelings, access and use memory and concepts, and deploy attention during emotions.

Across several meta-analyses, we have demonstrated that the brain regions that show an increase in emotional experience and perception are not specific to any one type of emotion (e.g., anger vs. fear vs. disgust, etc.). Rather, it appears that the same brain regions activated during emotions are part of neural networks that play domain-general functions in the human brain and are active during other emotional and cognitive mental states. We have also used meta-analysis to understand how the brain represents even more basic processes such as pleasant v. unpleasant value, social affective processing, and affective change in adolescence and late adulthood.

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What Can the Brain Tell Us About Emotion?
- Emotion Researcher

Where in the Brain are Emotions?
- Emotion News Blog

It is common sense that the body is involved in emotion—our hearts beat, breathing increases, and our palms sweat during fear and excitement. Our heartbeat and breathing slow during calmness and depression. I am interested in how these putatively non-emotional body states get woven into emotional experiences when they are made meaningful as emotional feelings. Our on-going work examines how physiological states intensify and become part of stress responses, social perceptions, and how physical states such as hunger and inflammation contribute to emotion. We are interested in how these physiological states interact with people’s awareness of their body (or “interoception”) and their beliefs about the role of their bodies in mental life. These findings have important implications for psychopathology, stress, and coping and indicate that the mind and body are not so distinct as once thought.

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What makes a woman’s body?
- Aeon Magazine

America has a hunger problem
- The Atlantic

When does hungry become hangry?
- The Conversation

It has long been assumed that emotions are universally experienced states—that the thrill of excitement, the dread of fear, and the glow of love are universally experienced, expressed and perceived across cultures. Yet my research suggests that the language a person speaks—and the emotion concepts it encodes—alter emotions. For instance, we have shown that the meaning of emotion concepts such as “anger,” “fear” and “love” differ in languages around the globe.

This may be because languages name emotion concepts that help a person to make meaning of their own and others’ states. In one study we demonstrated that individuals who don’t have access to emotion words any longer due to a neurodegenerative disease can no longer see scowls as angry, frowns as sad, or wide-eyed expressions as fear. Instead, these individuals can only detect the very general positive or negative meaning of facial expressions (e.g., they judge scowls, frowns, wide eyes, and wrinkled noses all as “bad” and smiles as “good”). In other research, we show that learning to associate facial expressions with emotion words such as "anger" shapes how you perceive and remember subsequent angry faces, an effect that may speak to how children’s acquisition of emotion words guides their increasingly complex knowledge of emotion. Our on-going work seeks to understand the neural basis of the role of language in emotion, how language helps children acquire emotion concepts, and how language shapes people's experiences of emotions in their own bodies. Understanding the more basic processes at play during emotion has implications for the study of social communication, emotional intelligence, socio-emotional development, psychopathology and cross-cultural psychology.

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Is joy the same in every language?
- National Geographic

What is love? It depends on which language you speak
- Science

Nonverbal Accents »
- APS Observer

It’s assumed that emotions are largely stable across the lifespan. Yet our research suggests that emotions, and their neural underpinnings, change at every stage of development, from infancy, to childhood, to adolescence, to young adulthood, to mid-life and older age.

My research examines how emotional experiences and emotion regulation vary with development of the nervous system and socialization. Our research examines emotion across the lifespan with a focus on major life stages, including early childhood (ages 3-6), adolescence (ages 12-18), early adulthood (ages 18-25) and mid-to-later life (ages 40-80). We have examined how preschoolers learn about the meaning of emotion words through language, how adolescents’ sensitivity to social rewards and punishments impacts their risk behavior, how younger adults’ brains process emotion differently than older adults’ brains, how body states become less central to emotion across the adult agespan.

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Do kids feel emotions stronger than adults do?
- Gizmodo

Constructing emotion
- The Wholebeing Institute