The Workshop aims to bring attention to fresh perspectives regarding the behavioral and neural foundations of emotions and their manifestation in both humans and other animals. Despite more than 150 years passing since Darwin’s groundbreaking work, a comprehensive understanding of why we express emotions and the primary functions they may serve remains elusive for scientists. The influential theoretical landscape has evolved, moving away from clear definitions of emotional displays solely as expressions of internal states - whose manipulation can influence emotions - to acknowledging communicative gestures specifically adapted for negotiating and cooperating within social interactions. The ongoing debate surrounding the mechanisms involved in perceiving these expressions has persisted, with new perspectives highlighting context-dependent interpretations of signals and their pivotal roles in emotional contagion and social synchronization.

We will explore core issues in animal and human expressions covering important theoretical accounts on how different species express and process others’ emotions, which are the neurobiological mechanisms and how do they affect other cognitive processes, such as reasoning, empathy, planning and moral judgements. We will also try to understand emotional expressions from a developmental perspective. In fact, psychological and psychopathological models have contributed to our understanding of the importance of how early social experiences contribute to the organization of brain mechanisms critical for emotional regulation. Engineers will contribute to the workshop by elucidating how emotional displays are central in artificial intelligence. Understanding emotions has important implications on how humans develop modern technologies that either have some sort of emotional organization or communicate emotionally with us. 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 fields of sciences: Ethology, Psychology, Psychiatry, Neuroscience, Robotics, Artificial intelligence, Anthropology.

The workshop is highly integrative and interdisciplinary. Presentations will be 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).