The Emotion & Self Lab
In the Emotion and Self Lab at the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, we study the evolutionary function, nonverbal expression, and psychological structure of emotions and self. Much of our research is focused on the place that self and emotions meet: the self-conscious emotions of pride, shame, embarrassment, and guilt. But we also study more basic level emotions linked to moral behavior, like disgust, as well as other complex social emotions, like humility and schadenfreude. We use a wide range of methods to study emotional processes, including behavioral observation and coding, social-cognitive techniques (e.g., reaction time assessment, eye-tracking), cross-cultural and cross-species comparisons, narrative assessment, and physiological (e.g., hormone) assessment; and we use experimental, cross-sectional, and longitudinal designs. In an effort to improve the study of self-conscious emotions, we have developed several measurement tools that are available to other researchers. These tools can be downloaded from this website. In all of our research, we tend to take a functionalist perspective, asking why questions about emotions and self, and seeking both ultimate and proximate answers.
Featured Media »
The Action-Unit Imposter Effect
Check out media coverage of our recent paper, published in Psychological Science, showing that a downward head tilt leads to increased perceptions of dominance, due to illusory facial muscle activity.
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Taking ginger pills can make disgusting ideas more palatable.

Francesco Carta / Getty
By Sam Wong
We often say our sense of morality is guided by our gut feelings – and this may be truer than we realise. A set of experiments using the anti-nausea powers of ginger have provided the strongest evidence yet that bodily sensations play a key role in some of our moral judgements.
Previous studies have reported that the more disgusted people feel, the more wrong they judge moral infractions to be. However, it’s not clear whether feelings of disgust guide moral judgements, or if it …
Read the full article in the New Scientist here >>
Featured Project »
How are Emotion Expression Honest Signals?
Emotion expressions can be understood as a form of social communication between a sender and a receiver: a signal. [...]
Read more »The Emergence of Status Hierarchies
Status differences are universal in all known human societies, and they partially determine patterns of resource allocation, conflict, mating, and group coordination. However, there’s little systematic research into questions of why and how hierarchies emerge. [...]
Read more »Latest News »
Our review of over a decade of work from the lab on pride and social hierarchy, now published at Advances in Experimental Social Psychology.
Tilting your head changes the way your emotion expressions are perceived, by causing illusory facial activity. See Zak Witkower & Jess’ new paper, now in press at Emotion
Jess’ essay on the physiological basis of moral disgust published in Aeon.
Which positive emotions do we experience as distinct? Now published at Affective Science: an empirically derived taxonomy of distinct, subjectively experienced, positive emotions.
Now published at Psychological Science: Zak and Jess’ paper demonstrating that head tilt functions as an action-unit imposter, dramatically changing the way that a neutral face is perceived
Upcoming Talks »
Jess Tracy, “Reciprocal relations between emotions and moral thought.”
Workshop on emotions and morality, University of Jerusalem
Jerusalem, Israel. May, 2021.