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.

Latest News »

Jess Tracy, Ian Hohm, and Ari Makridakis present new ideas (and some data) suggesting that science erodes humans’ ability to find meaning in life, now published at Current Directions in Psychological Science.

New research led by lab collaborator Ashley Martin shows that gender cognition– the tendency to see gender in non-human entities, and to see those entities as more human to the extent that they are gendered– is a human universal. See here for the PNAS article.

In research led by Zak Witkower, smile variation is shown to accurately leak personality. See here for the article in press at PNAS-Nexus. 

Our review of over a decade of work from the lab on pride and social hierarchy, now published in the Annual Review of Psychology.

Upcoming Talks »

Jess Tracy, “Pride: The Emotional Foundation of Social Rank” at the APF Spielberger EMPathy Symposium, APA Annual Convention.

Seattle, WA.

August, 2024

 

 

Books and Edited Volumes »

"Take Pride — now in paperback"

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"The Psychology of Social Status"

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"The Self-Conscious Emotions"

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