Colloquium
Kevin N. Ochsner, Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology, Columbia University
Title: From the self to social contexts: Evolving perspectives on emotion and emotion regulation
Abstract: Successfully navigating our complex social world involves at least three abilities: perceiving and interpreting other people’s actions and interactions in our groups, having emotional responses as a consequence of these perceptions and interpretations, and as needed, being able to exert top-down control over all of the above. This talk will describe the evolution of a general purpose, multi-level, model that helps organize our understanding of the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying these abilities. Towards that end, the talk will begin with a brief description of the starting point for the model - the study of the self-regulation of emotion - and then will transition into a discussion of how the model can be elaborated to account for perceiving and regulating emotion in social contexts. The talk concludes by considering broader implications of the model.