Research
Developing contextualized ways of studying emotion
Experiences of emotion emerge from bodily sensations (warmth, fatigue), perceptions of the surrounding environment (a soft pillow, the sound of rain), what we and others around us are doing (laughing, sighing), thoughts and associated concepts (weekend, deadline), and more. This tapestry of features varies from moment-to-moment, making each experience unique.
For this reason, I use innovative multimodal means of studying emotion as it occurs in the real-world contexts people must constantly navigate (Hoemann, Khan, et al., 2020, Scientific Reports; Hoemann et al., 2024, preprint). These methods capture situated variation in emotion that cannot be observed in the lab and support the hypothesis that people make use of contextual information every time they experience or perceive an emotion (Le Mau, Hoemann, et al., 2021, Nature Communications).