About the talk:
A remarkable feature of emotions is that they are felt — we can experience the sting of rejection just as we can experience the sting of an ant bite. These emotional experiences are a fundamental part of the human condition. As such, researchers across multiple disciplines seek to understand, predict (e.g., via emotion recognition AI), and improve the emotions that are so central to our day-to-day experiences. In this talk, Dr. Nicholas Coles will review methodological and quantitative approaches designed to illuminate the nature of emotional experience. Many theorists posit that emotional experience is built off sensations emanating from the peripheral nervous system (e.g., tensed muscles and accelerated hearts). Dr. Coles will review how these ideas have recently been probed via meta-analysis, an adversarial big team science collaboration, cross-cultural tests of outstanding methodological issues, and a big team machine learning challenge.

Nicholas Coles is from the University of Stanford.