Psychology Department: Emotions Research Group

The University of Delaware provides an exceptional opportunity for the study of emotions. There are 14 faculty members who engage in research on emotions or related topics. These faculty members represent all four of the doctoral programs in the Department of Psychology and the Departments of Individual and Family Studies and Communication.

• Biopsychology faculty do basic animal research, and their expertise includes areas of neuroendocrinology, neurobiology, neuroanatomy, and more generally, brain-behavior and brain-emotion relations. Their research provides basic knowledge on emotion-related problems such as bulimia, anorexia, sleep disturbances, anxiety, and neuroendocrinological and behavioral responses to stress.

• Faculty in the clinical psychology program have interests that include the biological basis of personality traits and psychopathology, the psychophysiology of emotions, stress and behavioral coping styles, emotion responses of peer-rejected children, social risk factors, and emotion-cognition relations, the development of socioemotional competence, and the prevention of behavior problems.

• Cognitive psychology faculty study topics like the basis of aesthetic preferences, memory and its development, and the relation of memory to emotions.

• Social psychologists' research include the determinants and consequences of perspectives on time and their effects on emotions, social processes, and aspects of personality, emotion expression and its measurement with an anatomically based microanalytic coding system, and emotions and health.

An Individual and Family Studies member conducts research on emotions in early childhood education and emotion-related beliefs and practices of teachers in early childhood programs. A member from the Department of Communication investigates the cognitive and physiological processes resulting from different types of emotional stimuli (media properties) and their consequences for communication.

Emotions Faculty And Their Interests

BIOPSYCHOLOGY

Seymour Levine - stress, development, reactivity, hormones

Jeffrey Rosen - neurobiological bases of fear and anxiety

Evelyn Satinoff - stress, response to novelty, circadian rhythms, aging

Thomas Scott - neural mechanisms of reward, neural control of feeding, coding of taste stimuli

CLINICAL SCIENCE

Brian Ackerman - children's emotional risk

Lawrence Cohen - stress, coping, depression

Julie Hubbard - role of emotion understanding, expression, and regulation in children's peer relationships

Carroll Izard - emotions theory, development of socioemotional competence, prevention of behavior problems

Roger Kobak - emotional reactivity during conflict in parent-adolescent and marital relationships

Robert Simons - psychophysiology of emotion and cognition

Marvin Zuckerman - emotional states and traits and their relationships to genetic/biological bases of personality traits

COGNITIVE

John McLaughlin - cultural and biological determinants of aesthetic response; perception of and memory for visual art

Brian Ackerman - memory development

SOCIAL

James Jones - temporal orientation, behavior management, prosocial behavior

Erika Rosenberg - emotion, facial expression, the role of anger and hostility in cardiovascular health

DEPARTMENT OF INDIVIDUAL AND FAMILY STUDIES

Marian C. Hyson - emotions and early childhood education

DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION

Ben Detenber - emotional and cognitive responses to mediated presentations

Psychology Department home page

Copyright 1997 University of Delaware
Comments, suggestions, or questions may be sent to celeste@udel.edu