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An Empirical Foundation for Understanding Positive Emotions

Objective

Positive emotions are of great importance for our physical and mental health and for our social relationships. However, scientific knowledge of positive emotions is lacking, with research to date being both fractionated and scarce. The Positive Emotions Project (PEP) takes on the challenge of formulating a foundational, empirically-based framework of positive emotions. This is accomplished by a set of studies combining methodologies that examine both subjective and objective elements of 17 positive emotions, including gratitude, awe, amusement, compassion, and relief. Central to the investigation is the integration of cross-cultural and developmental approaches, in order to differentiate between consistent patterns and idiosyncratic features. Project 1 will use experience sampling to map out the experience of positive emotions across ten dramatically different cultures, examining subjective elements of emotions, such as antecedent events and psychological states. Project 2 will comprehensively establish which nonverbal facial and vocal signals are associated with different positive emotions across cultures and ages. Project 3 will provide an integrated multi-level account of positive emotions, considering similarities and differences across emotions, taking into account cross-cultural and developmental patterning of subjective and objective features. The empirical and theoretical results of PEP will result in new, innovative paradigms, and substantial, freely available datasets that will help to redress the current dearth of data and approaches for understanding positive emotions. It will also provide the basis for a much-needed scientific, multifaceted account of positive emotion. Such a model will benefit scientists across many disciplines, including affective computing, behavioural economics, and psychiatry, whose work builds on psychological models of emotions.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

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Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-STG - Starting Grant

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Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) ERC-2016-STG

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Host institution

UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 500 000,00
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 500 000,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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