The Emotions in Context Lab
Welcome! The Emotions in Context (EMIC) Lab investigates how emotion varies by situation, by person, and by culture.
We are an interdisciplinary research group based in the Department of Psychology at the University of Kansas.
EMIC explained
We study how context shapes the feelings, understandings, and behaviors through which we relate to ourselves, each other, and the world. To do this, we use tools that capture emotion in the field of everyday life, and that allow individuals and communities to speak for themselves.
In anthropology, an “emic” approach is an insider’s perspective on experience and meaning. We adopted ‘EMIC’ as our lab acronym to reflect the connection with our core values and methods.
Project overview
Developing contextualized ways of studying emotion
We conduct studies that ask people to report on their experiences in their own words, while peripheral physiological activity (e.g., heart rate), movement, and other behavioral and environmental data (e.g., location) are recorded by sensors in smartphone and wearable devices. This approach allows us to examine emotion in high definition and discover patterns that emerge in each situation and for each person.
Modeling individual differences in emotion
People vary in how they experience and understand emotion, and these differences have widely been shown to impact relationships and health. We think of people who are skilled at emotion as being experts in this domain, and our studies are designed to help better understand how this expertise plays out over time and across contexts, as well as how it develops and can be improved.
Understanding cultural differences in emotion
Culture organizes how people make meaning of their own and others’ experiences, and different groups of people accomplish this task differently. We use descriptive and discovery-oriented methods that can reveal these differences and capture an insider’s perspective on cultural modes of feeling and interaction.
