SAS 2025 was a huge success, with 511 attendees from 21 countries! Portland served as the perfect destination for our affective science community to come together for 3 days full of stimulating talks and fun social events.
This year’s program included 3 preconferences, 16 symposia, and 5 innovation forums, along with more than 70 flash talks and 300 posters. Sessions spanned a wide range of topics, from affect’s role in decision-making and interpersonal emotion regulation, to computational modeling of emotional states and how AI may understand and support affective processes. If you’re into affective science, you couldn’t have found a better way to spend your time.
The Innovation Forum was a new format introduced this year that served to ignite expert-led discussions on the current challenges facing the field and ways to move forward. Five panels of experts deliberated over issues facing different areas of affective science, spanning emotion regulation flexibility to natural language processing. We saw further refreshing conversations at the Methods Roundtable – from Bayesian models to social network analysis, and our salons focused on topics such as studying affect in the wild and navigating opportunities as a domestic vs. international student.
Shining the spotlight on this year’s winners, we would like to congratulate (again) the amazing recipients of the Thematic Flash Talk & Poster Awards, Diversity Awards, Dissertation Award, Early and Mid-career Award, and Affective Science Paper of the Year Award!
The Presidential Symposium on the past, present and future of affective science — led by Dr. Rachael Jack, Dr. Robert Levenson, and Dr. Maya Tamir — was invigorating. We welcomed Dr. Rachael Jack as the President and Dr. Chris Oveis as the President-Elect this year.
As we sign off, we would like to thank the program committee co-chairs Dr. Jonas Everaert and Dr. Yael Millgram, who led the way in organizing this unforgettable conference experience! Looking forward to seeing everyone in Pittsburgh for SAS 2026.