Public Art/Science Collaborations

1. •UVA Science and Art Project
   

2. •Eye & I.  With London designer Helen Storey, I have collaborated on a conceptual art exhibit that expresses many of my scientific interests and findings in a creative and accessible way that is available to the general public. The first installation of this exhibit occurred in May of 2005, and new installations are in the planning stages. This work has been assisted by the Royal Court Theatre and generously funded by the Arts Council of England, and Creative Partnerships. For more information, see
   

•"Eye & I" on Front Row with John Wilson (9.2 MB)

•http://www.helenstoreyfoundation.org/pro5.htm

•http://www.creative-partnerships.com/news/91033?view=Standard

1. •Discrete Terrain:  Windows on Five Emotions.  Digital animation artist Eva Lee has used EEG asymmetry data from the VAN lab to generate alternative landscapes of emotional responding both across and within individuals.  “This work invites you to view the inner world of twelve individuals who participated in a study on the brain basis of emotions. Using data from EEG readings of the twelve subjects during five emotional states (anger, joy, fear, sadness, and disgust), artist Eva Lee and composer Manly Romero have created a visual and auditory journey through the discrete terrain of subjective experience." --Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
   

2. •Eva Lee’s website

Facial Movement and Emotional Experience

Our emotional expressions affect our own feelings and behaviors at least as much as those around us.  Researchers have long known that simply expressing an emotion, especially on the face, is sufficient for causing emotional experiences, or priming our responses to emotional stimuli.  The reason for this effect is still unknown and hotly debated.  As part of our ongoing interest in the social functions of emotion, our laboratory is working to understand how our own emotional behavior alters our experience.  For this work, we have used measures of subjective responses to physical pain, EEG measures of brain activity over the prefrontal cortex, and, most recently, fMRI measures of neural activity during emotional expression on the face.

The Social Regulation of Emotion

The VAN Lab is actively investigating the mechanisms through which close social relationships and broader social networks regulate a given individual’s emotional responses.  Utilizing functional neuroimaging, EEG and even measures of blood glucose concentration, we are developing a perspective on the regulation of emotion called Social Baseline Theory (SBT; Coan, 2008, 2010).  SBT proposes that many mammalian and bird species are hard-wired to assume close proximity to conspecifics—and to utilize social proximity and interaction as a default or baseline affect regulation strategy.  If true, then violations of the assumption of proximity should be (and indeed are) unconditionally threatening.  By contrast, proximity to and positive interaction with conspecifics should be implicitly regulating by decreasing perceived personal costs associated with potentially dangerous situations and environments. Of course, non-human animals are incapable of regulating themselves by thinking things like “it’s only a movie” because they do not have sufficiently powerful prefrontal cortices. By comparison, humans have very powerful prefrontal cortices, and commensurably powerful self-regulation capabilities. Even humans, however, cannot self-regulate for long periods of time without diminishing their self-regulation capabilities significantly. This decline in self-regulatory capabilities follows the depletion of metabolic resources in the PFC, a cost that impairs other important prefrontally mediated operations (e.g., analytical problem solving, working memory) as well. The biological principle economy of action suggests that organisms will conserve resources whenever they can, and that indeed they must continuously optimize the ratio of resources acquired to resources expended or they will not survive.  According to SBT, the prefrontal cortex represents a valuable and costly resource whose energy expenditures must be similarly managed, and socially mediated affect regulation is a powerful and efficient way to meet this need. SBT suggests social brains throughout the animal kingdom outsource, at lower cost, affect regulation (and problem solving, and memory) to their social networks.  This explains why individuals tend to invest less effort in regulating negative affect in the presence of their attachment figure (Coan, Schaefer, et al., 2006).  It is easy to see why this works.  In a threatening situation, there may be four problems to solve.  If you are alone, you must solve all four problems, which may involve a great deal of costly neural processing (and which, inefficiently distributed within your brain alone, might increase the probability of mistakes).  If you are with a stranger, you know that at least one problem is taken care of (you no longer need to outrun the bear, for example, just the stranger).  If you are with a trusted and interdependent partner, however, you may need to solve only two problems, or one (or, if you have an avoidant attachment style, five—making close relationships costly).