Invited Speakers

Dr. Bartsch specializes in research on media uses and effects, with a special focus on media entertainment and emotional media effects. Her current research deals with the appeal of moving and thought-provoking media experiences and with the effects of such experiences on individuals' issue involvement, information seeking, and political participation concerning the issues portrayed.

Dr. Oosterwijk is interested in a phenomenon called morbid curiosity (i.e., seeking out images, videos, and stories that detail death, violence, or harm). She will discuss epistemic, eudaimonic and affective motives that may explain why people engage with emotionally evocative content.

Dr. Cameron studies why and how people are motivated to empathetically engage with or avoid others' suffering. Decisions on whether or not to share in others' experiences are based on how people consider the costs and benefits of empathy and enact different emotion regulation strategies. He will summarize his work using the empathy selection task to explore motivated empathy regulation about suffering through the lens of situation selection.

Dr. Harris studies dehumanised perception as a proactive emotion regulation strategy. His research demonstrates that people predict empathy requirements in impending social interactions and dehumanise when they expect the social interaction to be emotionally taxing. He will discuss research documenting that medical professions engage dehumanised perception to stave off burnout and facilitate better care for their patients.

Dr. Rosenkrantz Lindegaard has a background in cultural anthropology and criminology. Her pioneering work on bystander behavior challenged the assumption that bystanders are passive agents, showing that intervention during conflicts, rather than apathy, is the norm.

Dr. Pallante is an ethologist with an expertise in conflict management strategies in non-human primates. Guided by her interest in the evolution of behaviour, she has recently adopted an interdisciplinary approach to transfer her ethological expertise to the study of emotion expression in human conflicts.