Eliza Bliss-Moreau

Eliza's research focuses on understanding affect, a fundamental ingredient of emotional experiences, and how organism-to-organism variation in affect shapes variation in psychological wellbeing. Affective states arise when the value of external stimuli is computed (e.g. determining whether a stimulus is good or bad, harmful or helpful) and therefore serves as a barometer of an organism’s place in the world. The biological mechanisms that generate affect produce healthy, normal variation in affective states between individuals (or within an individual across contexts). It is possible, even probable, that emotion-related psychopathology arises when the mechanisms underlying healthy individual variation in affect are perturbed. Understanding the fundamental structure and biological underpinnings of affect is therefore important for unearthing the etiology of, and developing effective treatments for, emotion-related psychopathology. Further, they hope that captive animal management and welfare will benefit from being able to measure the ingredients of emotion objectively in non-linguistic animals.