Affective science (the study of emotions, moods, affect-based pathology and other emotion-related phenomena) has expanded dramatically in recent years. Its impact has been felt throughout psychology, biology, neurology, neuroscience, and psychiatry. This growth has been accompanied by scientific specialization that has had both benefits and costs. Among the benefits are increasingly mature theories and a veritable explosion of methodological advances and empirically-derived knowledge concerning aspects of affect ranging from molecular to molar levels. Among the costs are more narrow training and increasing isolation among areas of specialization, resulting in affective scientists who may not have familiarity and facility with traditions other than their own. Our training program augments the specialized training predoctoral students receive in their chosen fields with substantive exposure to other traditions and methods within affective science. Moreover, by sharing didactic, workshop, and other experiences over a three-year period, predoctoral trainees form a cohort group at an early stage of their career that fosters much stronger professional ties to those from other approaches and disciplines than would occur in traditional training. The multi-university nature of the training program also serves these goals, greatly expanding the community of affective scientists that trainees meet, learn from, and work with. The training program is built on the view that fostering an appreciation and understanding of the theories, methods, and data of areas of affective science beyond one's own area of specialization lays the groundwork for better communication among subspecialties, more interdisciplinary collaborations, and a stronger and more integrative affective science. In this application for a second five years of support, we propose to continue selecting four new predoctoral trainees per year from psychology, neuroscience, and health sciences programs at four Bay Area universities (the Berkeley, Davis, and San Francisco campuses of the University of California and Stanford University). Trainees participate in a three-year training sequence leading up to their dissertation research. Training takes place in a yearlong seminar at Berkeley, visits to training faculty laboratories at the four campuses, specialized methods workshops, and an annual conference/workshop where trainees' research findings are shared and discussed. Close mentoring and monitoring of trainee progress is maintained throughout. We believe that this method of training students has significant social benefits, which derive in part from the considerable potential for applying knowledge derived from basic affective science to a range of public health issues. Research on emotion and other affective phenomena has numerous important applications including: (a) mental health and illness; (b) physical health and disease; (c) attachment, loyalty, and relationship quality; (d) well-being; (e) societal problems such as addiction and violence; (f) treatment design and evaluation; and (g) inter-group conflict and communication.
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