In her recent talk, Professor Siân Bayne from the Centre for Research in Digital Education, talked about the teacherbot that was launched as part of the the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC on Coursera.

Built by human teachers, the teacherbot automated elements of the teacher function within Twitter, and included some attempts at empathy, emotion and affect. Siân’s talk used teacherbot’s forays in emotion to consider the ‘compulsory anthropocentrism’ of education and what that might mean for its digital futures.

Questions asked by the audience included:

• To what extent does the teacherbot’s performance of emotion mirror human emotion performance?
• Will the teacherbot be able to move from performing emotions to having emotions in the future?
• Did students on the MOOC want the teacherbot to be human/humanize him/her?
• Was the teacherbot purely algorithm-based or was there an element of artificial intelligence?
• How does the teacherbot help us reflect on processes of automation in education?

What Siân’s video to find out more – coming soon.

EVENT POSTPONED

Please note that due to strike action called by UCU on 25th and 26th May we have decided to postpone this event. We will be advertising a new date soon. 

Apologies for any inconvenience.

• Do you have an interest in emotions research?
• Are you interested to build interdisciplinary links across the University?
• Would you like to explore collaborative research and funding opportunities?

We would like to invite you to a networking and funding event to celebrate and connect emotions research at the University of Edinburgh.

Over the past few months, we have hosted a series of lunchtime seminars on emotions, with speakers from disciplines as varied as counselling and psychotherapy, neuroscience, history, fashion, digital education and sociology.

We would like to celebrate our network by inviting you to a networking and collaborations event.

When? Thursday, 26th May 2016, 3.00 – 5.00 pm

Where? School of Health in Social Science (Teviot Medical School), Doorway 6, Room 4.1

The event is free, and everybody is welcome!

We welcome especially people who haven’t been able to make it to any of the seminars.

Please join us for a fun, informal, and interactive opportunity to get to know each other and discuss ideas for collaborative projects and funding applications.

Refreshments, wine and cake will be provided to celebrate the network.

Please register via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/celebrating-emotions-research-networking-and-funding-event-edinburghuni-tickets-25049564923

We hope to see you there!

In his talk Mark Miller, from the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, took us on a journey from cognitive science to neuroscience to the ways in which wisdom theories and religious philosophies conceptualise meaning-making and being-in-the-world.

Many disciplines have traditionally stressed the ‘co-constructed’ nature of knowledge (e.g. many social science perspectives and most qualitative research approaches), and that our actions and feelings are influenced by our past experiences (e.g. psychoanalytic thought or socialization theories).

In his talk, Mark gave a neuroscience perspective on this phenomenon: the brain interprets signals based on prior experiences, and thus our neurological responses to events are always conditioned by our past. He drew parallels to how different religious philosophies conceptualise our experience of the world, e.g. the Buddhist wisdom ‘Life is a dream’ interpreted as life is impermanent, changing and co-constructed. Mark discussed what practices such as mindfulness training may offer to reflect on and become more conscious of these processes which shape our day-to-day experiences and emotions.

Questions asked by the audience included:

• What parallels can be drawn to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and his seeing the world through paradigms?
• What is the scope of human agency in breaking through established patterns and escaping from the determinism of our past/brains?
• What do we know about the algorithms underlying changes in the brain, and which parts of the brain are responsible for what?
• Is neuroscience an individualistic endeavor – and how can it consider the social and relational aspects of our experiences?

Watch Mark’s talk to find out more.

In his recent talk as part of our seminar series, Professor Douglas Cairns from Classics talked about his work on emotions in ancient Greek literature, using the example of Euripides’ ‘Hippolytus’. The talk was an intriguing illustration of how literature can give us insights into people’s emotional expressions and moral practices thousands of years ago.

Life is an affective continuum. Affective experiences do not come ready labelled. But emotions also exist in language, and this makes a difference not only to how we study them, but also to the subject matter of the study itself. Douglas discussed the ‘embeddeness’ of emotion, showing how, in the play, Phaedra expresses her emotions by talking about how other people feel, about what happens in the human body, and by using the metaphor of a house to evoke emotion.

In his talk, Douglas asked questions about the role of language and literature in the cross-cultural and historical study of emotion. For example, in both ancient Greek and Latin new words emerged at similar times to identify (and bring into existence?) particular emotion terms (and emotions?), e.g. the Greek syneidesis, and the Latin con-scientia – ancestors of our modern term ‘conscience’.

Analysing the play, Douglas raised questions about the role of emotions for shaping people’s actions (and if and how actions are motivated by our internal commitments or through other people around us) and about the role of physical responses (‘shudder’) in understanding emotions metaphorically and cross-culturally.

Questions asked by the audience included:

• Have men’s emotions been described as embodied and situated in ancient literature in the same way as women’s emotions?
• How has laughter been used and instrumentalised by classic poets and playwrights?
• How do people use non-propositional expressions of emotions in literature and narratives, and what can we take from this for emotion research? (e.g. when emotions are not ‘named’ as such, e.g. happiness, sadness, but instead are articulated ‘between the lines’)
• Is catharsis useful?

Watch Douglas’ video to find out more about his talk.

Mairi Ann Cullen (University of Warwick), Gillean McCluskey (University of Edinburgh), Gale Macleod (University of Edinburgh), and Anne Pirrie (University of the West of Scotland) were recently invited to give a talk about their paper  ‘Parents of excluded pupils: customers, partners, problems?’, for which they were awarded Educational Review’s Article of the Year Award 2013.

In this introduction to the seminar, the authors reflect on the importance of human relationships and emotions, and how these are undermined by a culture of accountability in higher education, schools and social work.

In her recent talk as part of our seminar series, Daphne Loads from the Institute of Academic Development reflected on how different understandings of emotion ripple through a newly published collection of writings on academic identities.

Research on academic identities is a growing area of scholarly enquiry. While critics may dismiss this as a navel-gazing activity (a critique that Daphne acknowledged and addressed in her presentation), questions about the perception of roles and values of academics are fundamental to understanding the changing landscape of global university developments – shaped, for example, by increasingly powerful frameworks of performativity, accountability, and neoliberal political approaches to higher education.

How does this affect the emotional experiences of academics in their day-to-day lives? And how do emotions contribute to the very shaping of these academic identities, and to academic relationships? These were questions that Daphne raised, framed by a feeling of ‘unease’ – about criticising a system from a relatively comfortable position within it.

Questions asked by participants included:

• How can we create spaces to talk about emotions, without those spaces being reappropriated by the neoliberal university? Or, do we need to integrate talking about emotions into the latter in order to justify this?
• How can we keep room for surprise and curiosity in everyday academic lives?
• How are emotions in academia gendered?
• Which emotions are connotated positively, which emotions are stigmatised, and which emotions make us vulnerable?
• What role do emotions play in academic hierarchies and power dynamics?
• What is the range and flux of emotions of working in a university?
• Which are the emotions we do not talk about easily – e.g. jealousy, shame, or anxiety?

Watch Daphne’s video to find out more about her ideas – videos.

How does fashion make you feel?

How inclusive of different identities of gender, race, age, body size and dis/ability is the world of fashion?

Looking at fashion shows across the world, and fashion images in magazines, the answer is probably ‘not very much’.

Mal Burkinshaw, Programme Director of the BA (Hons) Fashion at Edinburgh College of Art, challenges unhealthy fashion images which fail to take into account the diversity of people’s bodies and identities. In his talk he shared stories about his work with students, prompting them to consider the emotional wellbeing of their models and customers by stepping outside of unhealthy and exclusive ideas of aesthetics and beauty – a process called ‘emotionally considerate design’.

Mal currently takes this work forward by leading the Diversity Network, which is committed to “developing a base of innovative research, acting as a Scottish pioneer of excellence and leadership in addressing and ameliorating the lack of attention to human diversity in the fashion industry.”

Questions asked by seminar participants included:

• Do women and men face equal issues of representation and objectification in the fashion industry?
• What effects do ideals from the fashion industry have on children?
• What are the effects of introducing ‘real life models’ earlier in the design process, rather than working with mannequins?
• What parallels are there to other disciplines, e.g. Nursing Studies, where students are prepared more or less theoretically to work with real human beings?

If you’d like to know more about Mal’s ideas, watch our video of his talk!

As researchers interested in emotions, we are familiar with questions of representation – how (if at all) can language capture emotional lives?

When working with our web-designer to develop the graphics of this website, this challenge was suddenly expanded to include the myriad of possibilities and pitfalls of visually representing emotions.

Particularly in online spaces and on social media, an ever increasing amount of emoticons and emojis allows users to express (perform?) their emotions via shorthand, uniform smileys which reduce emotions to stylized representations. Of course, as many of us have experienced by pondering over texts or emails, the meanings of these signs are far from straightforward or universal. However, they have become an indispensable part of popular culture, both on- and offline, and our header references their capacity to change the emotional connotations of written text in more or less ambiguous ways.

However, the minefield of emotional meanings of design did not stop at our discussion about whether smiley faces are trivializing or ironically referencing emotions, but continued into the choices of colours for the site background.

Both personal and cultural emotional meanings of colours came to light: while ‘white’ may be associated with a blank emotional canvas, we were worried that ‘pink’ may be associated with femininity (and by extension, emotions relegated into the feminine domain as is often the case), ‘red’ with pulsing love or screaming anger, ‘green’ with jealousy etc. Our cultural differences became visible when it became apparent that not all of us had heard about ‘yellow’ being associated with cowardice, or when it turned out that ‘feeling blue’ does not translate literally into other languages.

Of course, the question arises if by considering the emotional connotations of certain colours, we are in fact reinforcing stereotypical assumptions about them.

How have you approached the visual representation of emotions?

What is your emotional experience of looking at this website? 😉

We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section.

New website online!