Welcome to the Emotion & Cognition Laboratory!

Broadly speaking, we seek to understand the relationship between feeling and thinking - that is, emotion and cognition - in everyday life. How do you integrate your thoughts and feelings when making decisions? How do such phenomena change across the adult life span?

We study the role of emotion in decision making, how positive and negative emotions impact our judgments, and the changes in these phenomena in later life. Our research uses a number of different approaches to investigate the questions we’re interested in: surveys, behavioral tasks, and even physiological measurements that show us the physical changes associated with emotional responses.

Taken together, we are coming to better understand how emotion-cognition interactions change across the life span. Our ultimate hope is to discover practical means by which quality of life can be enhanced at all stages of life.