Dave is named Incoming Editor for APA's journal Emotion as of Jan 1, 2011
Check out a front page feature in the Boston Globe on our work investigating the dynamics of trust with the MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group. Link is on our press page.
We're excited that affective science at Northeastern is growing with Lisa Feldman Barrett's arrival and a new position in the social area to begin in Fall 2011.
Welcome to the Social Emotions Group. The lab is directed by Dr. David DeSteno with generous support from the National Science Foundation and Northeastern University. Our goal is to illuminate the complex and reciprocal relations binding emotion and social behavior. In short, we’re most interested in how emotions shape decisions and actions underlying many of the most important facets of social living. From morality to interpersonal relationships, from honesty to economics, from bigotry to altruism, from compassion to aggression, we’re working to uncover how emotions impact behaviors that are at the heart of sociality. In so doing, we’re trying to understand not only how emotion systems can optimize our actions, but also how “bugs” in the system can lead to less than optimal results.
To learn more about the team and our work, we encourage you to explore this site. And, in Spring 2011, look for our new book based on the pioneering work of the lab in charting the surprising dynamics underlying human social behavior, tentatively titled True Colors: The Hidden Forces That Change Who We Are.