Dennis Küster

 

Dennis Küster PhD, researcher Unit of Clinical Psychology: Emotion, Cognition, Health    Address: Department of Psychology Catholic University of Louvain Place du Cardinal Mercier 10 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve Belgium  Phone: +32-10-47 20 62  Fax.: +32-10-47 37 74  E-Mail:       Research domains   Representative publications

 

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Research domains

• Emotion and social context effects
• Emotion (sadness) from a clinically oriented perspective

1. Emotion and social context effects

My main research interests are in the appraisal and expression of emotion, and how social context affects emotional processing at multiple levels. This includes subjective report as well as various physiological measures, e.g., EMG and EEG.

• In particular, I am interested in facial activity and its potentially diverging functions towards social groups like friends and strangers.

I have been using a multi-method approach to investigate effects of social context on facial activity. This has included studies of response times with an Implicit Association Test (IAT) at the level of response times, as well as further studies looking at facial electromyography.

• Typically, in my physiologically oriented studies, our participants watched a set of funny films under different conditions of sociality, and we measured their reactions with a response time task, questionnaires, or facial EMG. Usually, these have been experiments with individual participants or dyads of friends and strangers.

2. Emotion (sadness) from a clinically oriented perspective

Before focusing on social context and facial activity, I have been interested in emotion and sadness from a more clinically oriented perspective. This study investigated induced sadness and different measures of EEG in an attempt to compare our findings to previous research on major depressive disorder.
 

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Representative publications

Theses

Küster, D. (in prep.). The relationship between emotional experience, display rules, and communicative functions: An investigation of processes underlying facial activity. PhD Thesis, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany.

Küster, D. (2003). Experimentelle Emotionsinduktion und frontale α-Aktivität. [Experimental induction of emotion and frontal α-activity]. Diploma Thesis, Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, Germany.

Articles

Laudien, J.H., Küster, D., Sojka, B., Ferstl, R., & Pause, B.M. (2006). Central odor processing in subjects experiencing helplessness. Brain Research, 1120, 141-150.

Talks

 

Kappas, A., & Küster, D. (2006). Priming “we” or “they” affects level of orbicularis oculi activity in response to funny films: An investigation on the relationship between emotions and facial activity. Presented at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, Vancouver, BC, Canada. (October 2006).

Küster, D., & Kappas, A. (2006). Implicit associations between the concepts of friends/strangers with showing/hiding emotions: An indirect investigation on the relationship between emotions and expressions. Presented at the 2nd Meeting of the Consortium of European Research on Emotion (CERE), Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium (May 2006).

Kappas, A, & Küster, D. (2005). Facial activity: A tale of emotions and social influences. Presented at the XIVth General Meeting of the European Association for Experimental Psychology, Würzburg, Germany (July 2005).