We are delighted to invite you to the International Workshop “ANIMAL AND HUMAN EMOTIONS” which will take place on May 17-22, 2016, in Erice, Sicily (Italy). The workshop will be held within the School of Neuroscience at the “Ettore Majorana” Erice Centre and is supported by the Italian government. Organizers: Pier Francesco Ferrari and Frans de Waal
Please visit our website: http://old.unipr.it/arpa/mirror/erice2016/speakers.htm
The
workshop will be held in Erice, in Sicily, a gorgeous ancient seaside
city in Italy. There will be ample time in between sessions to explore
the city and sample the local restaurants. The workshop will include an
excursion into the countryside to visit ancient Greek temples.
The
purpose of the Workshop is to highlight new perspectives on animal and
humans emotions. Since Darwin’s seminal work of almost 150 years ago,
scientists have debated why we express emotions, how we understand them
in others and how emotions impact our choices and moral judgments. In
the study of animal behavior, talk of emotions has long been taboo,
followed by a time in which they were declared irrelevant. In the last
few decades, this situation has changed, however, and animal emotions
are more openly considered. Emotions can be seen as evolutionary
adaptations to the environment, but also as an important process that
provides the glue of social groups. Even though emotions are often
lumped together with instincts, they are also critical in abstract
reasoning, planning, and moral judgment. Modern technology requires the
construction of robots and machines that either have some sort of
emotional organization or communicate emotionally with us. Engineers
will contribute to the workshop by elucidating how emotions are central
in artificial intelligence. Most psychopathologies or neurodevelopmental
disorders are associated with deregulation of emotional processes and
therefore our comprehension of their role in development and in clinical
populations is critical. This workshop will bring together leading
figures in science who apply an evolutionary method and an
interdisciplinary approach to the basic mechanisms of emotions in order
to understand how they organize behavior. The workshop will foster
discussion between scholars, students and researchers from different
field of sciences: Ethology, Psychology, Psychiatry, Neuroscience,
Robotics, Anthropology.
The
workshop is highly integrative and interdisciplinary. Thus, we
encourage speakers to give a presentation addressed to a broad audience
represented by different disciplines and within disciplines, by
different levels of seniority (e.g., graduate students, post-doctoral
fellows, junior and senior faculty). Once we have finalized the list of
speakers, we will open a website to announce the meeting and open up
registration for approximately 120 graduate students, postdocs, and
other interested scientists.
Issues
covered by the Workshop will be: 1. Neural mechanism of emotions, 2.
Empathy and prosocial behavior, 3. Development, 4. Psychopathology, 5.
Learning, 6. Artificial intelligence and emotions.