Closed projects

Aesthetic modulation of affective valence. The pleasure taken in disgust, anger and sadness in aesthetic experience (205)

Winfried Menninghaus, Thomas Jacobsen

Art often manages that otherwise negative emotions become part of a pleasant experience. The interdisciplinary project tries to collect evidence to this seemingly paradoxical phenomenon via psychological experiments.

Affective and aesthetic processes in reading (110)

Arthur Jacobs, Winfried Menninghaus, Oliver Lubrich

Speeches and texts compete for attention, emotions, aesthetic pleasure and sometimes approval of their addressees. The project aims to identify determining variables of these cognitive and affective processes in reading.

Anger and Anxiety: Dimensions of social inequality (320)

Christian von Scheve, Jürgen Schupp

Are there systematic relationships between the experience of specific emotions and people's socioeconomic status? Do people from different social strata experience some emotions more often than others?

Are Germans really green-eyed monsters? Cross-cultural perspectives on benign and malicious envy (407)

Christian von Scheve, Isabel Bohrn, Kristin Prehn, Thomas Stodulka

The behavioral consequences of envy can be either destructive or emulative. Which of these facettes are prompted by distinct cultural and socio-economic environments?

Authority, esteem, trust and respect. Emotions and recognition in political processes (312)

Catherine Newmark

Psychological categories such as authority and trust play an important role not only in the formation of values, but also in the interaction of the political actors.

Awareness of emotions: Movement behavior as an indicator of implicit emotional processing in subjects with and without alexithymia (307)

Hedda Lausberg

In this project, we investigate whether or not implicit emotional processes are reflected in the movement behaviors of subjects suffering from alexithymia.

B.A.L.I. 2: Language and gesture of Alexithymia (112)

Gisela Klann-Delius, Cornelia Müller

How is alexithymia expressed in language and gesture?

Bilingualism and affectivity in reading (201)

Markus Conrad, Arthur Jacobs, Gisela Klann-Delius, Michael Eid

Taking a cross-language perspective, we investigate the specific encoding and connotations of specific emotional contents in different languages and their implications for the language related emotion processing of bilingual individuals.

Comparing emotional expression across species – GibbonFACS (308)

Katja Liebal, Bridget Waller, Anne E. Burrows

This project investigates in the evolutionary history of communication of emotions: Which facial expressions do all primates share, which might be unique to humans?

Compassion and the "New Priesthood": Transforming the Victorian Moral Economy? (GW 703)

Rob Boddice

With the rise of evolutionary models of morality after 1859, to what extent was social practice reconfigured according to new notions of the meaning of compassion?

Conceptions of Emotion in Empirical Aesthetics around 1900 (311)

Jutta Müller-Tamm, Henning Schmidgen, Tobias Wilke

What is the relationship between the two most fundamental developments in aesthetics around 1900 – between the turn toward a discourse of emotions and the turn toward an experimental methodology – and how do these historical developments relate to current attempts to investigate aesthetic feelings by empirical means?

Coolness. Forms and functions of culture-specific affect control in American and Japanese literature and culture (304)

Ulla Haselstein, Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit

The phenomenon of coolness is examined by two particular projects, on the one hand as an emotional quality of a globalised youth culture, and on the other hand as an aesthetic concept in Japan.

Do birds tango? Biological origins of rhythm as a carrier of emotions (210)

Constance Scharff , Henrike Hultsch

Rhythm carries important affective information in human speech, music, gestures and dance. Whether this is true for non-human vocal communication is unknown.

Embodying the nation: Collective emotions and national identification. Lessons from the 2010 FIFA World Cup (408)

Christian von Scheve, Gavin Sullivan, Hauke Heekeren, Sven Ismer,

By focusing on the FIFA World Cup 2010 we examine the reinforcing impact of collective emotions on national identification and feelings of group-belonging and the reducing effect on the evaluation of in-group minorities or out-groups.

Emotion, violence and memory in coping with civil wars. A cultural comparison (310)

Ute Luig, Birgitt Röttger-Rössler, Cilja Harders

How do people in war-torn societies (Cambodia and Timor Leste) overcome, communicate, and remember past experiences of violence and which emotions are articulated in these processes?

Emotional Endophenotypes (405)

Malek Bajbouj, Hauke Heekeren, Isabella Heuser, Arthur Jacobs

Individual characteristics of behavioral phenotypes of humans are dependent upon environmental factors as well as upon genetic factors and gene-environment interaction.

Emotions in economic crises: meltdown, bubble, collapse – panic, anger, and guilt (402)

Christian von Scheve, Oliver Lubrich, Sven Ismer, Christine Angela Knoop, Veronika Zink

Metaphors of emotion in the discourse surrounding the current financial crisis.

Emotions in word and facial processing (209)

Annekathrin Schacht, Werner Sommer

Publications Schacht, A. (2011, Im Druck). Reviving a forgotten dimension – Potency in affective neuroscience. Fontaine, J., Scherer, K. R., Soriano, C. (Eds.). Components of Emotional Meaning: A Sourcebook. New York: Oxford University Press. Bayer, M., Sommer, W., Schacht, A. (2011). ...

Emotive involvement in conversational storytelling (202)

Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, Margret Selting

How do we signal emotions in everyday interaction? What verbal and nonverbal resources do speakers employ to make emotive involvement accessible for the recipient? How do interlocutors manage what happens next?

Empathy in great apes – does witnessing the harming of another conspecific influence helping behaviour? (214)

Katja Liebal

Aim of this project is to investigate emphathy and subsequent helping behaviour in a closely related nonhuman primate species, orangutans within the framework of possible roots of human social emotions. The question is whether orangutans are more likely to help a conspecific after witnessing the ...

Experiences of Fascism (401)

Oliver Lubrich

Reports of international visitors in Nazi Germany (1933-1945)

Expression and transference of emotion in 19th-century Italian and French opera (316)

Clemens Risi

The musical and theatrical representation of affects, and their transmission to the listener and observer, has always been the central theme of opera.

Forgiveness: Conceptual and empirical analyses (412)

Angela Merkl, Christian von Scheve, Simone Grimm, Malek Bajbouj

How do emotions influence the tendency, ability, and willingness to forgive a transgression and how does forgiving a transgressor influence one’s emotions?

Honor and dishonor – pride, shame and anger: An investigation into the norms of experiencing, expressing and regulating self-related feelings in sub-populations of German and Turkish origin (106)

Michael Eid, Tanja Lischetzke, Birgitt Röttger-Rössler

This multidisciplinary, comparative cultural study is intended to examine differences in the norms of experiencing, expressing and regulating the emotions of shame, pride and anger in sub-populations of German and Turkish origin in Berlin and Istanbul. In particular, differences between the two ...

How do humorous texts produce positive emotions? Linguistic and emotional frameworks for laughter and amusement in funny poems and scenes (406)

Bernd Blaschke, Katharina Spalek

Humorous art produces positive emotions not only by means of semantic punch lines. We will explore the linguistic and emotional structures of humorous texts.

How miracles really work: Minimally counterintuitive concepts in the context of emotion and styles of speech (314)

Rasha Abdel Rahman , Oliver Lubrich, Arthur Jacobs, Werner Sommer

The world of fairy tales, myths and legends is filled with wonder: they are emotional concepts that violate our system of knowledge. Why do these concepts have such a major impact on our culture, and how do our brains process them?

Imaginations of Passion – Passionate Imagination: Shakespeare's Poetics of Feeling (309)

Verena Lobsien

The project seeks to read Shakespeare's plays and poems with a focus on the transition and interaction between passion and imagination. It aims at describing a Shakespearean 'poetics of affect'.

Interactions between linguistic and emotional competencies - comparative studies of children and adults with linguistic and/or emotional disorders (114)

Gisela Klann-Delius, Christina Kauschke, Hauke Heekeren, Prisca Stenneken

Verbal interaction and communication is based on the integration of linguistic and emotional information.

Investigations on the dynamics of affective viewer responses to film (416)

Hermann Kappelhoff, Lars Kuchinke, Arthur Jacobs

What is the relationship of the temporal composition of audiovisual pictures and the temporal dynamics of the viewers’ feelings? Which roles in this are played by plot constellations and cinematic aesthetics - and how do they interact?

Mechanisms of fear. The mass media’s construction of the terrorist threat – an intercultural comparison (108)

Jürgen Gerhards

Individuals and groups react to events which they interpret as threats with fear and anxiety. In the Western world at present it is the activities of Islamicist terrorist groups that are seen as the main threat, while in the Islamic world the interventions of mainly Western countries with little ...

Medium and emotion. On the emotional effect of music under various media conditions (318)

Elena Ungeheuer, Stefan Weinzierl, Hans-Joachim Maempel

Today, music is predominantly received by media. The technical reproduction alters the "language of emotions" in many respects – as a physical event and as a psychological phenomenon. Does it change its emotional effect as well?

Meterered language and emotion (115)

Sonja A. Kotz, Martin von Koppenfels, Winfried Menninghaus

Scholars of poetry traditionally claim that meter makes a specific contribution to the emotional impact of a poem. Our project tries to substantiate this claim and to explore the neurophysiological correlates of this emotional effect.

Multimodal metaphor and expressive movement (305)

Hermann Kappelhoff, Cornelia Müller

A model of dynamic orientation of affect in spoken discourse, TV reports, TV series and fictional films.

Origins of human social emotions (118)

Michael Tomasello

Humans experience particular emotions that even our nearest primate relatives do not know. Where do these unique emotions come from-ontogenetically in the development of young children, and phylogenetically in the evolution of the human species?

Passion and Distinction: The Encoding and Functions of Love in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (206)

Andrew J. Johnston , Russel B. West-Pavlov

In medieval and early modern English literature courtly love plays a dual role: on the one hand it serves as a means of social distinction, on the other it becomes a marker of heightened literariness.

Philosophical pre-conditions of speaking about emotion. On the foundation of emotional language-games (303)

Gunter Gebauer

Gegenstand des Projekts sind die Voraussetzungen, die zum einen die Sprache des Subjekts über seine eigenen Emotionen, zum anderen die Sprache über die Emotionen fremder Personen ermöglichen.

Processing of Emotion and Language - Development and interaction across lifespan (319)

Isabell Wartenburger

Emotional cues, especially facial expression of emotion and emotional prosody can be considered pivotal for the acquisition and development of cognitive skills (e.g., language).

Processing of Emotional Prosody in Asperger Syndrome (207)

Lars Kuchinke, Arthur Jacobs, Sonja A. Kotz

Publications Kuchinke, L., Schneider, D., Kotz, S. A., Jacobs, A. M. (2011). Spontaneous but not explicit processing of positive sentences impaired in Asperger's syndrome: Pupillometric evidence. Neuropsychologia 49 (3). 331-338.

Prosody and the theory of affect in the 18th century (306)

Lars Korten, Winfried Menninghaus, Jan Stenger, Friederike Wißmann

How to compose lyric poetry: Debates on metre and affect in 18th century German literature.

Reading and emotional competence: The interaction between emotional and language competencies and their changeability (104)

Michael Eid, Georg Witte, Isabella Heuser, Gisela Klann-Delius, Winfried Menninghaus, Rüdiger Steinlein

How can the contemporary exploration and study of children’s books with a high literary / aesthetic level increase the emotional competencies in children?

Recognition and Esteem – Performance evaluation – Learning atmosphere. Processes of educating emotions in school (211)

Christoph Wulf

The pre-established culture of recognition and esteem in a primary school will be examined as a structural element of the pedagogical process.

Socialisation and Ontogeny of Emotions in Cross-Cultural Perspective (215)

Birgitt Röttger-Rössler, Manfred Holodynski

To what extent do cultural factors influence the transmission and acquisition of emotional knowledge, patterns of emotional behaviour and emotion regulation from birth to puberty?

Sound physiognomy in language organization, processing and production (410)

Markus Conrad, Sonja A. Kotz, Oliver Lubrich

What does the sound of language tell us? Do already the basic sublexical elements of sound – the phonemes – possess emotional value providing distinct elements of speech with a certain emotional colour?

Spaces of fear in novels of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period: Reflecting knowledge, re-evaluating, re-conceptualizing (203)

Annette Gerok-Reiter

How, with which semantics, in which context and with which functions do representations of fear express themselves, specifically in those contexts where literary norms oppose the thematization of fear?

Talking (about) emotion: Emotion regulation through verbal expression (415)

Kristin Prehn, Malek Bajbouj, Hauke Heekeren, Arthur Jacobs, Gisela Klann-Delius, Winfried Menninghaus

The project is aimed at providing scientific evidence for the hypothesis that verbal expression and communication of one’s emotional state influences emotional self-regulation.

The Berlin Alexithymia Inventory – B.A.L.I. 1 (109)

Isabella Heuser, Malek Bajbouj, Hedda Lausberg, Michael Eid, Hauke Heekeren

This project aims at a comprehensive understanding of alexithymia and to develop an inventory covering a great amount of facets of alexithymia.

The Emotionalization of Religion – new emotional styles in the field of religious experience (414)

Regine Herbrik, Hubert Knoblauch

Traditionally, religion is closely associated with emotions (such as joy or fear). The project investigates the relevance of emotions in contemporary Christian congregations.

The Sense of Appropriateness. Emotions and Normativity (213)

Hilge Landweer

Emotions are capable of showing us what we deem important and hold dear. Do they hence also allow normative orientation? Or are we bound to norms exclusively on the grounds of rational discernment?

The actuality of pictorial representations of the affects: medial and discursive constructions in the early modern period (116)

Klaus Krüger

What are the medial and discursive constructions of affects and emotions in the non-verbal expressive form of the image?

The affective foundations of sociality: Language, physiology and social differences (411)

Christian von Scheve, Tobias Schröder, Markus Conrad

What are our affective reactions to linguistic representations of social interaction? What is the role of automatic bodily reactions in these processes? And do patterns of such reactions systematically differ between socio-economic status groups?

The chances of transnational understanding in a united Europe: Emotional language binding and acquisition of foreign languages (107)

Jürgen Gerhards

The European Union has increasingly developed from a political to a social body. If the social integration of a Europe having 23 official languages and a large number of regional languages is to proceed further, the only possible way to accomplish this task would appear to be by enhancing the ...

The impact of emotional cues on word learning in children aged 14, 20 and 26 months (113)

Gisela Klann-Delius, Angela Friederici

(How) Does emotional prosody influence word learning? We attempt to find an answer to this question by conducting word learning experiments with young children.

The language of the body and the language of the novella: The interaction of physiology and poetics in the Romance novella from Boccaccio to Madame de Lafayette (101)

Irene Albers,

Romance novellas draw upon a specific repertoire of affectively determined bodily reactions. Their characters blush, turn pale, go rigid, weep, perspire, laugh, tremble, become feverish, fall silent or loose consciousness

The mobilization of emotions in war films (111)

Hermann Kappelhoff

This project explores the composition of emotions in Hollywood war films. We seek to develop a standard method to analyse the relations between cinematic audiovisual forms and the patterns in which emotions are evoked through the media.

The neurobiology of empathy in narcissistic personality disorder (208)

Stefan Röpke, Malek Bajbouj, Isabel Dziobek, Hauke Heekeren, Isabella Heuser

Empathy is the ability to recognize and understand the state of mind of another person and can therefore be considered as prerequisite for successful social interactions. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPS) is one of the few psychiatric disorders which is not only characterized by ...

The pathologizing of catharsis in the 19th century: Bernays, Freud, Nietzsche (119)

Martin Vöhler

In 1857, Jacob Bernays breaks with the Aristotelian catharsis tradition by introducing "solicitation" to philology, observing that Aristotle had used a medical model as the basis for poetic catharsis.

The processing of affective information across different media modalities (117)

Lars Kuchinke, Arthur Jacobs, Hermann Kappelhoff, Helmut Leder

Do different media modalities (words, pictures, films) elicit comparable affective processing?

The rhetoric of empathy. A cognitive-narratological model (317)

Dietmar Till

How do readers empathize with characters in narrative fiction? How can a reader vicariously feel the emotions of a literary character? In literary criticism “reading with empathy” has not yet been described systematically.

The role of facial mimicry and emotional contagion in the decoding of emotions (105)

Tanja Lischetzke, Michael Eid, Michael Niedeggen

Individuals differ in the extent to which they imitate others’ emotional expression and in their susceptibility to catch others’ feelings. Are these individual differences related to the ability to decode others’ emotions?

The scientific study of aesthetic affects and effects in the Russian avant-garde (121)

Georg Witte

The subject of the project is a transdisciplinary discourse on the emotional dimensions of the effects of art in the early Soviet Union. The aim is to shatter a historically established dogma that denies the emotive aspects of the work and influence of theoretical and artistic avant gardes. ...

The significance of emotional cues for sleep-dependent memory consolidation in language acquisition (302)

Manuela Friedrich, Angela Friederici, Gisela Klann-Delius

Both emotions and sleep modulate memory processes. So far, the interaction of emotion, sleep, and memory during early development is completely unknown. The aim of our research project is to identify the impact of the interaction of emotions and sleep on the fast mapping of words on reference ...

Touching and to be touched: "movere" in dance (103)

Gabriele Brandstetter,

The project examines the question of how the various types of physical contact in dance are connected with the evocation of feelings. The intention is to examine the phenomenon of "movere" from a double perspective: as movement and touching of the body on the one hand, and as being moved/touched ...

Touching, Moving, Catching. A detailed analysis of complex feeling concepts (409)

Winfried Menninghaus, Thomas Jacobsen,

Publications Hanich, J. (2010). Collective Viewing. The Cinema and Affective Audience Interrelations. Passions in Context. The Journal for the History and Theory of Emotions 1 (1).

Towards a neural basis of aesthetic emotions (417)

Stefan Koelsch, Winfried Menninghaus, Arthur Jacobs

Emotional experience during listening to music or reading is a major motivation to consume music and literature in everyday life. This interrelation provides us with valuable opportunities to study neural correlates of emotion.

Training socio-emotional competencies: Development and evaluation of a new SOCIAL COGNITION TRAINING TOOL (SCOTT) for adults (216)

Hauke Heekeren, Isabel Dziobek, Hermann Kappelhoff

The aim of the project is the development of a new test and training software targeting socioemotional competencies.

Transformations of feelings: Philosophical theories of emotion 1250-1650 (313)

Dominik Perler

In which ways did medieval and early modern philosophers define emotions? How did they relate them to sensations, beliefs, and desires?

Tristan and Iseult and the medieval culture of emotions (404)

Jutta Eming

There’s more to the biggest love story ever told than just love. Due to the rich variety of emotions represented in this medieval novel, Tristan and Isolde is of special interest for research into the history of emotions.

Unleashed Passion between Speech, Gesture, and Sound (315)

Albrecht Riethmüller

This musicological project investigates a fundamental phonetic area in which musical sounds and speech, supported by visual effects (gestures), merge, thereby serving the manifestation of basic affects.

Unsettling rhetoric: arguments for undermining the opposition (413)

Martin Vöhler, Therese Fuhrer, Monika Schwarz-Friesel,

Good arguments are not always enough to convince another person. To raise doubts in the recipient's mind often is just as important for the process of persuasion. This project examines strategies (both in written and spoken discourse) used for this purpose.

Vision and Affect: Altarpieces with embedded miraculous images in Italy 1510-1610 (301)

Martin Baisch, Andreas Degen, Jana Lüdtke

Which knowledge do Early Modern images contain on their own potential to arouse affects in the beholder? The project focuses on the re-staging of older miraculous image which were embedded in new altarpieces in 16th century Italy. Shifting relations between art and cult resulted in the ...

Languages of Emotion