Ursula Hess (psychologist)

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Ursula Hess (13 August 1960 in Frankfurt/Main, Germany) is a German psychologist who teaches at the Humboldt-University of Berlin as Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at the Department of Psychology. [1]

Contents

Education

Hess received a Diploma in psychology (MA equivalent) from the Justus-Liebig University in 1986 and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Dartmouth College in 1989.

Career

From 1989 to 1992, Hess was a post-doctoral researcher (Maître Assistant) at the University of Geneva. In 1992, Hess began a professorship at the University of Quebec at Montreal, where she was promoted to Full Professor in 2000. [2] She is currently Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at the Department of Psychology at the Humboldt-University of Berlin [1]

She was elected President of the Society for Psychophysiological Research in 2017. [3]

Her research focuses the communication of emotions. In particular, the social factors that influence this process such as gender [4] [5] and intergroup relations. [6] [7] [8] One line of research investigates the role of facial mimicry, i.e. the imitation of the emotion expressions of others, for successful emotion communication. [9] Another line of research on social context influences focuses on the social signal function of emotions. [10] [11] Specifically, on the information about the person or the context that people can infer from the emotional reactions of others [12] [13] as well as the impact of explicit context information on this process. [14] Both lines of research include research on cross-cultural emotion communication.

Some of this work was done in collaboration with Shlomo Hareli. [11] [13] [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emotion</span> Conscious subjective experience of humans

Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, or creativity.

Psychophysiology is the branch of psychology that is concerned with the physiological bases of psychological processes. While psychophysiology was a general broad field of research in the 1960s and 1970s, it has now become quite specialized, based on methods, topic of studies and scientific traditions. Methods vary as combinations of electrophysiological methods, neuroimaging, and neurochemistry. Topics have branched into subspecializations such as social, sport, cognitive, cardiovascular, clinical and other branches of psychophysiology.

A facial expression is one or more motions or positions of the muscles beneath the skin of the face. According to one set of controversial theories, these movements convey the emotional state of an individual to observers. Facial expressions are a form of nonverbal communication. They are a primary means of conveying social information between humans, but they also occur in most other mammals and some other animal species.

An emotional expression is a behavior that communicates an emotional state or attitude. It can be verbal or nonverbal, and can occur with or without self-awareness. Emotional expressions include facial movements like smiling or scowling, simple behaviors like crying, laughing, or saying "thank you," and more complex behaviors like writing a letter or giving a gift. Individuals have some conscious control of their emotional expressions; however, they need not have conscious awareness of their emotional or affective state in order to express emotion.

Emotional contagion is a form of social contagion that involves the spontaneous spread of emotions and related behaviors. Such emotional convergence can happen from one person to another, or in a larger group. Emotions can be shared across individuals in many ways, both implicitly or explicitly. For instance, conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination have all been found to contribute to the phenomenon. The behaviour has been found in humans, other primates, dogs, and chickens.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frown</span> Facial expression

A frown is a facial expression in which the eyebrows are brought together, and the forehead is wrinkled, usually indicating displeasure, sadness or worry, or less often confusion or concentration. The appearance of a frown varies by culture. An alternative usage in North America is thought of as an expression of the mouth. In those cases when used iconically, as with an emoticon, it is entirely presented by the curve of the lips forming a down-open curve. The mouth expression is also commonly referred to in the colloquial English phrase, especially in the United States, to "turn that frown upside down" which indicates changing from sad to happy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emotionality</span>

Emotionality is the observable behavioral and physiological component of emotion. It is a measure of a person's emotional reactivity to a stimulus. Most of these responses can be observed by other people, while some emotional responses can only be observed by the person experiencing them. Observable responses to emotion do not have a single meaning. A smile can be used to express happiness or anxiety, while a frown can communicate sadness or anger. Emotionality is often used by experimental psychology researchers to operationalize emotion in research studies.

The facial feedback hypothesis, rooted in the conjectures of Charles Darwin and William James, is that one's facial expression directly affects their emotional experience. Specifically, physiological activation of the facial regions associated with certain emotions holds a direct effect on the elicitation of such emotional states, and the lack of or inhibition of facial activation will result in the suppression of corresponding emotional states.

According to some theories, emotions are universal phenomena, albeit affected by culture. Emotions are "internal phenomena that can, but do not always, make themselves observable through expression and behavior". While some emotions are universal and are experienced in similar ways as a reaction to similar events across all cultures, other emotions show considerable cultural differences in their antecedent events, the way they are experienced, the reactions they provoke and the way they are perceived by the surrounding society. According to other theories, termed social constructionist, emotions are more deeply culturally influenced. The components of emotions are universal, but the patterns are social constructions. Some also theorize that culture is affected by the emotions of the people.


Valence, also known as hedonic tone, is a characteristic of emotions that determines their emotional affect.

Klaus Rainer Scherer is former Professor of Psychology and director of the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences in Geneva. He is a specialist in the psychology of emotion. He is known for editing the Handbook of Affective Sciences and several other influential articles on emotions, expression, personality and music.

Display rules are a social group or culture's informal norms that distinguish how one should express themselves. They can be described as culturally prescribed rules that people learn early on in their lives by interactions and socializations with other people. They learn these cultural standards at a young age which determine when one would express certain emotions, where and to what extent.

Paula M. Niedenthal is a social psychologist currently working as a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She also completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where she received a Bachelor's in Psychology. She then received her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan before becoming a faculty member of the departments of Psychology at Johns Hopkins University and Indiana University. Until recently, she served as the Director of Research in the National Centre for Scientific Research at the Université Blaise Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand France. The majority of Niedenthal's research focuses on several levels of analysis of emotional processes, this would include emotion-cognition interaction and representational models of emotion. Niedenthal has authored more than 80 articles and chapters, and several books. Niedenthal is a fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Facial electromyography</span> Electromyography technique that measures muscle activity of the face

Facial electromyography (fEMG) refers to an electromyography (EMG) technique that measures muscle activity by detecting and amplifying the tiny electrical impulses that are generated by muscle fibers when they contract.

Amy Gene Halberstadt is an American psychologist specializing in the social development of emotion. She is currently Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor of Psychology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and is an editor of the journal Social Development.

Social Mirror Theory (SMT) states that people are not capable of self-reflection without taking into consideration a peer's interpretation of the experience. In other words, people define and resolve their internal musings through other's viewpoint. SMT's background is derived from the 1800s from concepts related to the study of public opinion and social interaction by Wilhelm Dilthey, the German philosopher and sociologist.

The study of the relationship between gender and emotional expression is the study of the differences between men and women in behavior that expresses emotions. These differences in emotional expression may be primarily due to cultural expectations of femininity and masculinity.

Emotional intelligence (EI) involves using cognitive and emotional abilities to function in interpersonal relationships, social groups as well as manage one's emotional states. It consists of abilities such as social cognition, empathy and also reasoning about the emotions of others.

A functional account of emotions posits that emotions facilitate adaptive responses to environmental challenges. In other words, emotions are systems that respond to environmental input, such as a social or physical challenge, and produce adaptive output, such as a particular behavior. Under such accounts, emotions can manifest in maladaptive feelings and behaviors, but they are largely beneficial insofar as they inform and prepare individuals to respond to environmental challenges, and play a crucial role in structuring social interactions and relationships.

Shlomo Hareli is an Israeli psychologist, Full Professor of Social Psychology at the School of Business Administration at the University of Haifa. At present, he is serving as the head of the school.

References

  1. 1 2 psycho_adm. "Prof. Dr. Ursula Hess — Institut für Psychologie". www.psychologie.hu-berlin.de (in German). Retrieved 2018-06-17.
  2. "UQAM | Département de psychologie | Tous les professeurs". psychologie.uqam.ca (in French). Retrieved 2018-06-17.
  3. "Officers, Board Members and Staff". Society for Psychophysiological Research . Retrieved 17 June 2018.
  4. Hess, Ursula; Adams, Reginald B.; Kleck, Robert E. (2009-12-12). "The face is not an empty canvas: how facial expressions interact with facial appearance". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences. 364 (1535): 3497–3504. doi:10.1098/rstb.2009.0165. ISSN   0962-8436. PMC   2781893 . PMID   19884144.
  5. Hess, U. (2015). Introduction: Gender and Emotion. Emotion Review, 7, 4-4. doi : 10.1177/1754073914544578
  6. "Group dynamics and emotional expression | Social psychology". Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 2018-06-17.
  7. Hess, U. & Adams, R. B., Jr., Kleck, R. E. (2009). Intergroup misunderstandings in emotion communication. In: Demoulin, S., Leyens, J.-P., Dovidio, J. F. (Eds.), Intergroup misunderstandings: Impact of divergent social realities (pp. 85-100). Psychology Press. ISBN   9781848728035
  8. Hess, Ursula; Fischer, Agneta (2017-09-26). "The Role of Emotional Mimicry in Intergroup Relations". The Role of Emotional Mimicry in Intergroup Relations. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.433. ISBN   9780190228613.
  9. Hess, U. & Fischer, A. (2013). Emotional mimicry as social regulation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 17, 142-157. DOI: 10.1177/1088868312472607
  10. Fischer, Agneta; Hess, Ursula (2017-10-01). "Mimicking emotions". Current Opinion in Psychology. 17: 151–155. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.07.008. ISSN   2352-250X. PMID   28950963. S2CID   40317456.
  11. 1 2 Hareli, S. & Hess, U. (2012). The social signal value of emotion. Cognition & Emotion, 26, 385-389. doi : 10.1080/02699931.2012.665029
  12. Hess, U. & Hareli, S. (2018). On the malleability of the meaning of contexts: The influence of another person's emotion expressions on situation perception. Cognition and Emotion, 32, 185-191. doi : 10.1080/02699931.2016.1269725
  13. 1 2 Hareli, S. & Hess, U. (2010). What emotional reactions can tell us about the nature of others: An appraisal perspective on person perception. Cognition and Emotion, 24, 128-140. doi : 10.1080/02699930802613828
  14. 1 2 Hess, U., & Hareli, S. (2017). The social signal value of emotions: The role of contextual factors in social inferences drawn from emotion displays (pp. 375-392). In J. Russell & J.-M. Fernandez-Dols (Eds.), The Science of Facial Expression. Oxford University Press. ISBN   9780190613501