The Emotion News Mission

Like Federally funded science, we here at Emotion News have a few Specific Aims. Specific Aims are the scientific endeavors that researchers tell funding agencies they will accomplish during a specific grant period. In other words, it’s what we want to do, why we want to do it, and how we’re going to get it done. Our specific aims are to:

1)   Provide a source of the up-to-date emotion science translated for an audience that may not have a PhD in Emotion.

We’re interested in this task because we’d like to add our voices to how emotion science is represented in the media.  Emotion, as a science, is a funny thing.  Everyone has emotions, and as humans we effortlessly see emotions in others.  As a result, everyone has an idea of how emotions work, but those ideas often don’t match the science.  Often, our science is about sussing out the things that don’t quite make sense on first blush and explaining why they actually do. There can be a big void between people’s day-to-day reality and the science of emotion.  One of our goals is to fill that void.  We’ll do that by reviewing the state-of-the-art science and translating it into easy to understand language.  And, we’ll be inviting others to do the same too.  Have a topic you’d like to see covered?  Leave us a comment or email us at info.emotionnews@gmail.com.

2)   Open up ideas for debate and a venue for commentary.

One of the best parts of science is its discourse.  Scientists do experiments, document their findings, see patterns in those findings, develop patterns into theories… all the while engaging in conversation and debate with our peers.  We’re interested in opening up that process as much as possible. With that being said, please review our Commenting Policy below.

Commenting Policy

Our commenting policy has been designed to encourage engaging, open scientific communication. We will revise and update it based on experience.  The binding guidelines below will be updated accordingly. We welcome constructive criticism, pointing us in the direction of reference that we might have missed, interesting or novel ideas that could be tested scientifically, or commentary that expands our collective horizons. If you’d prefer to contact us directly, you can email us at info.emotionnews@gmail.com. In the service of our primary goal, comments that are deemed “not in the spirit of emotionnews.org” will be removed at the discretion of the editorial board (currently, The Founders).

1)   Comments must be related to the content of the primary post.
2) Inflammatory comments, personal attacks, and rude language (e.g., sexually explicit, related to race, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.) are not permitted.
3) “The plural of anecdote is not data”.  Said another way, just because you’ve experienced the world in a particular way does not mean that there is data to support your perspective.  We reserve the right to delete pseudoscientific or mock-scientific claims (i.e., claims made to sound scientific that are really just about personal experience).
4) We’re going to start off by moderating comments, which means that when you post a comment it might not appear right away.
5) We may revise this policy at any time.

Editorial Policy

1) Views and opinions expressed on Emotion News are those of the specific author of a specific story.
2) The founders withhold the rights to serve as editors in order to review stories by contributors before they are posted. This process is meant to ensure that stories’ tone, clarity, and accuracy reflect the mission of Emotion News.