Speakers
TED-Style Talk
Thursday, March 20 5:00-6:15PM
How Our Environments Shape The Way We Feel
David Lydon-Staley, University of Pennsylvania
Emotions and media entwined: How our feelings guide and reflect media engagement
Our media use is intimately bound up with our emotional experiences. Fluctuations in our emotions can lead us to engage with media, and media are often designed to elicit emotions upon exposure. With two examples, we will complicate our thinking about media’s effects on emotions by examining bidirectional associations between emotions and media. The first example will focus on people’s everyday engagement with the news. The second example will focus on epistemic emotions and their expression on knowledge-rich platforms (e.g., Wikipedia). Throughout, the need for intensive repeated measures data coupled with conceptual and analytic frameworks that capture the complex interplay between person and media environment will be emphasized.
Keynote Symposium
Friday, March 21 2:00-3:00PM
Bringing Emotion Research to Life: Real-World Applications
Judith Andersen, University of Toronto at Mississauga
Mind Over Matter: Utilizing Psychophysiology and Biofeedback to Mitigate Police
Lethal Force.
Science has demonstrated that internal physiological states during stress occur continuously to shape perception, cognition, emotion and behaviour. The role of police is unique among first responders, requiring the ability to successfully use weapons and tactics during intense physiological stress reactivity while simultaneously being ready to engage in controlled verbal-social interaction to de-escalate situations that do not call for the use of force. Clearly, maintaining flexibility between states of pure sympathetic and modified sympathetic/parasympathetic arousal is necessary and requires expertise in the modulation of the autonomic nervous system. Chronic stress and allostatic load further increase the risk of occupational errors and poor health outcomes among law enforcement officers. The current presentation describes a decade of research on the application of heart rate variability biofeedback (HRVB) in novel ways among law enforcement officers during active field training and assessment (Andersen, Arpaia & Gustafsberg, 2021). The talk will also address the associated benefits of training HRVB in police (e.g., reductions in use of force and shooting errors, improved health).
Awards Symposia
Best Dissertation in Affective Science Award
Anthony Vaccaro, University of Southern California
Early-Career in Affective Science Award
Brett Q. Ford, University of Toronto
Mid-Career Trajectory in Affective Science Award
Jamil Zaki, Stanford University
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