Welcome to the Carolina Affective Science Lab (CASL) at the University of North Carolina. Our research uses social cognitive methods, psychophysiology, and neuroimaging to ask questions about the basis of human emotion. At core, our research addresses questions about what emotions are, how they are created by the brain, and how they shape social behavior.

Our on-going lines of research are united by the hypothesis that emotions are constructed of more fundamental psychological processes that are general to all mental states. In this view, emotions arise from the combination of basic affective responses, concept knowledge, and attention. We are interested in how these more basic psychological ingredients interact during the experience and perception of emotions, and in what happens to emotion when there are alterations to either process. Other research topics include questions about the organization and complexity of emotion knowledge, how language shapes emotion perception and experience, individual differences in emotion, how attention during emotion experience shapes behavior, and how, more generally, the processes that constitute emotions can be mapped to the brain.

The CASL is hiring a full-time Research Assistant starting in August 2013. For more information or to apply, see here.