The excellence cluster Languages of Emotion brings together academic expertise from more than 20 disciplines spanning the sciences and humanities, to study the interdependencies between language and emotions. The research focuses on the close association between the use of symbols and affect transfer, imagination, esthetic practices, psychological dispositions, and the construction of personal and social identities. Since August of this year, the cluster has had a magnetic resonance tomograph.

The cluster's graduate school supports doctoral projects with outstanding potential for leading to new findings in the field of emotion research. The graduate school offers Ph.D. students an interdisciplinary course of study as well as intensive individual supervision.

Damasio's keynote speech is entitled "Brain, Emotion, and Consciousness." Damasio is a professor at the University of Southern California and founder of the Brain and Creativity Institute. He is known to a broader public through some of his publications, such as Descartes’ Error (1994) and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (2003).

Date and Location:

Lecture Hall 1a, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, October 21, 2008, 5:00 pm, admittance begins at 4:00 pm
For tours through the labs, please meet in front of Lecture Hall 1a at 3:45 pm.

For further information and registration, please contact:

Dr. Rita Pokorny, Languages of Emotion, Freie Universität Berlin, Email: rpokorny@zedat.fu-berlin.de

Link to information about the graduate school:

http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/en/languagesofemotion/graduiertenschule/index.html