Health, Emotions, & Altruism Laboratory (HEAL)
Living harmoniously in large-scale societies requires individuals to suppress their more selfish inclinations and prioritize the welfare of others. The Health, Emotions, & Altruism Laboratory (HEAL) examines the forces that drive prosociality and morality. Our projects aim to answer a fundamental question about humans:
How do we transcend our own self-focus to care about other people, groups, and society as a whole?
Self-Transcendent Emotions
Self-transcendent emotions include awe, compassion, gratitude, inspiration, love, admiration, elevation, and kama muta. These emotions are the glue that binds individuals and societies together and have a profound impact on others, groups, and the individuals who experience them.
Promoting empathy and altruism toward another person. We explore how emotions like compassion, gratitude, and awe facilitate empathy and altruism and examine the factors that moderate these effects.
Encouraging cooperation and cohesion within groups. What compels us to sacrifice our own desires for the greater good of the group? We examine how emotions like awe promote a more collective orientation and feeling of connection to a cause greater than themselves. We also ask how and when awe can result in more negative outcomes like extreme nationalism, radicalization, and cults of personality.
Enhancing the health and well-being of the individual. We focus on the impact of self-transcendent emotions, especially for building meaning, purpose, and social connection. We also examine how these emotion impact physiological responding, by encouraging vagal activation, and influence immune responding, by reducing inflammation. Finally, I am currently a collaborator the Karakter Project to explore how adversity influences self-transcendent emotion development.
Morality
A sense of morality also holds societies together and reduces selfishness. We explore how individuals are evaluated as moral or immoral agents, and the impact of those evaluations.
Expressing moral outrage toward transgressors. Moral outrage is one way individuals can uphold a society’s moral norms. We explore this affectively ladened phenomenon and how it is influenced by important social relationships. For instance, we investigate how moral outrage is diminished when close others transgress, but enhanced when powerful people transgress. We also examine how individuals can take on the morality of objects they come into contact with, through a process called moral contagion.
Evaluating transgressors. People are agents that can do good or bad. We investigate how observers judge transgressors and how those judgments unfold in complex situations in which someone transgressed to help another person or for ideological reasons (e.g., to protect the environment).
Regaining moral status. Once someone transgresses, what happens next? How do they regain their lost moral status? We outline a process of moral redemption. We question whether redemption occurs in real life or whether it represents an abstract notion that is almost impossible to actually achieve.
Health, Emotions, & Altruism Laboratory 