Speaker: Katsumi Watanabe
Professor, Waseda University

Title: Implicit Behavioral/Emotional Contagion

Abstract:
People tend to implicitly assimilate each other. In this talk, I will present several studies of implicit behavioral/affective contagion. The first set of experiments concerns speed contagion, where people tend to modify their movement timing according to others’ movements. In the second set of experiments, we examined how the presence of another person and the history of interaction with the person would influence body movements. The third experiment shows that covert manipulation of vocal emotion changes the speaker’s emotional state. I will introduce and discuss other projects if we have extra time.

Biography:
Katsumi Watanabe is a Professor at Waseda University (Department of Intermedia Art and Science, Tokyo, Japan). He received B.A in experimental psychology and M.A. in life sciences from the University of Tokyo and his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems from California Institute of Technology, for his work in cross modal interaction in humans. He was a research fellow at National Institute of Health (USA), a researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology (Japan), and Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo (Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology). His laboratory research focuses on perception, cognition, action, decision making, social perception, individual difference, brain functions, and affective science. The main themes include scientific investigations on explicit and implicit processes in human perception, cognition and action, interdisciplinary approaches to cognitive sciences, practical applications of knowledge of cognitive, neuro and affective sciences.

Web: http://www.fennel.sci.waseda.ac.jp/members/watanabe_katsumi_en.html

Hosted by Cybernetic Humanity Studio (OIST - Sony CSL collaboration)

Zoom URL: https://oist.zoom.us/j/99681015767?pwd=dzRjcExFTTUvSHUxcVYxMHdVMSs1dz09