WHO WE ARE ::

Monjira Biswas
Hajira Choudry
Yasaman Kazerooni
Sooin Lee
Mehgha Shyam

research assistants

COLLABORATORS ::

universität mainz
university of birmingham
university of massachusetts
universität marburg
nasa ames research center
national science foundation
universität
potsdam

Xiaoxiao Guo
Nan Jiang
John Laird

Satinder Singh

michigan computer science
michigan linguistics
Marc Berman
university of toronto
michigan psychology

cognition and emotion (and other serious stuff)

A new strand of our work concerns the interaction of cognition and emotion. The empirical work currently focuses on the effect that mirth and other positive emotions have on cognition. This includes the first demonstration of the opposing effects of two distinct positive emotions (mirth and elevation) on cognition (specifically, moral judgements) that are independent of positive valence per se.

We are also exploring how emotions and other automatic processes influence evaluative judgments (moral, humor, aesthetic). For instance, we have done work examining how eye-movements and pupil dilation predict the appreciation of humor in cartoons from The New Yorker.

(Humor is an amazingly under-studied phenomenon in psychology, but there is enough known that Rod Martin recently wrote a textbook called The Psychology of Humor).

 

relevant publications

Attend to the copyright notice.

Strohminger, N., Lewis, R. L., and Meyer, D. E. (2011). Divergent effects of different positive emotions on moral judgement. Cognition, 119:295-300. [ PDF ]

Marinier, R. P., Laird, J. E., and Lewis, R. L. (2009). A computational unification of cognitive behavior and emotion. Cognitive Systems Research, 10(1):48-69. [ PDF ]

These references were generated by bibtex2html 1.93.