On July 23, at the CogSci 2014 conference in Quebec City, there will be a workshop on “Computational Modeling of Cognition-Emotion Interactions: Relevance to Mechanisms of Affective Disorders and Therapeutic Action”. I am on the workshop’s panel committee, with a great set of researchers. I will also be submitting a paper.
If you’re doing related research on emotion and have new results and ideas to share, please consider submitting a paper. If you’re simply interested in emotions from a cognitive science perspective, then also please consider attending the workshop.
Note that the workshop explores psychotherapeutic implications of computational theories of emotion, something I explored in Cognitive Productivity: The Art and Science of Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective. There is, in my opinion, a largely untapped overlap between transformative education and psychotherapy. Not only does psychotherapy call for deep education, but transformative education calls for the kind of change sometimes seen in successful therapy. The same relation holds between self-directed learning and effective “self-help”.
That’s why there’s a running example in Cognitive Productivity of how to learn relationship principles from John Gottman’s books (e.g., from The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work). If your goal isn’t merely familiarity with Gottman’s (or any one else’s) ideas, but to be able to live and breath them, then you need to approach them systematically. With multiple concrete examples, Cognitive Productivity explains how to use cognitive science and technology to learn effectively.
At the workshop, Keith Oatley, author of the seminal book, Emotions, cited in Cognitive Productivity and my Ph.D. thesis, will be giving a keynote on “The cognitive bases of emotions, emotional disorders, and psychotherapy”.
From the Call for Papers :
Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in developing computational models of emotion and emotion-cognition interaction, within the emerging area of computational affective science. At the same time, emotion theorists and clinical psychologists have been recognizing the importance of moving beyond descriptive characterizations of affective disorders, and identifying the underlying mechanisms that mediate both psychopathology and psychotherapeutic action.
As our name suggests, CogZest provides publications and services that tap into affective cognitive science. CogSci Apps Corp., develops software based on the same.
