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The Neuroscience of Emotion: From Reaction
to Regulation
2009 Third Annual Tufts University Conference on Emerging Trends
in Behavioral, Affective, Social, and Cognitive (BASC) Neurosciences
To be held in the Aidekman Arts Center, June 4-6, 2009
40 Talbot Ave, Tufts University, Medford, MA, 02155
Key Organizer: Heather L. Urry, Department of Psychology, Tufts University
Sponsored by American Psychological Association and Tufts University
Introduction
As we move about in the world, we are barraged with events that we rapidly
evaluate as "good" or "bad" with respect to their effect on meeting our goals.
These often intense, sometimes short-lived affective changes and evaluations are
reflected in subjective experience, expressive behavior, and central and
peripheral physiology. It has been argued that these affective changes orient
attention and engender the energy we need to make appropriate behavioral
responses. What are the neural mechanisms by which this affective system
operates? How does it change over the course of the lifespan or with experience?
How do "hot" emotions interact with "cold" cognitive processes? How does
emotional responding go awry in psychopathology, and how can we regain control
when it does? Our third conference will bring together speakers who can provide
answers to these fundamental and important psychological questions using diverse
measures of behavior, physiology, and neural structure and function in both
humans and non-human animals. Particularly important for the field to move
forward is an explication of the affect-related information processing taking
place in single brain regions and also how single brain regions operate in
functional circuits to promote adaptive behavior. There has been much progress,
which will be showcased in the planned oral and poster presentations, but there
is still much theoretical and empirical work to be done as researchers in the
field of affective science wrestle with the very definition of emotion,
whether it should be approached as a set of basic or dimensional processes, and
how we should think about the separation (or lack thereof) between reactive and
regulatory processes. This conference will promote an expanded conception of the
field of affective neuroscience, one that informs (and is informed by) work
taking place in the laboratories of psychophysiological scientists,
neuroscientists who study human participants at different phases of the
lifespan, and neurobiologists who study the neural basis of emotion in non-human
animals. The talks and poster sessions will facilitate the cross-pollination of
ideas and a set of future directions that will best lead to rapid advances in
the neuroscience of emotion.
To learn more about the speakers at this conference, click
here.
To see guidelines for poster abstract submission, click
here.
Questions about the conference may be addressed to
psych.conference@tufts.edu.
We'd like to give special thanks to our sponsors:
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