Professor in Neuropsychology of Emotion and Affective Neurosciences at the department of Psychology and the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, Didier Grandjean is interested in the neuropsychology of emotion and the cortical and subcortical mechanisms involved in vocal and facial emotional expressions and the cognitive processes during the genesis of emotions.
The temporal aspects of appraisal processes of emotion and the underlying brain processes is one of my central research issues. The main goal of my thesis, under the direction of professor Klaus Scherer, was to examine the sequence hypothesis. More specifically, a series of EEG studies adressed the hypothesis of a temporal sequence of the evaluation checks.The processes underlying the perception and evaluation of emotional prosody are a major topic of my research. Different projects are ongoing in collaboration with the University Hospital of Geneva using brain imaging techiques. FMRI and high density surface electroencephalography are used to investigate the psychological processes involved in emotional prosody decoding. Beyond these usual brain imaging techniques, local field potentials (LFPs) analysis from intracranial recordings in humans is used to determine the treatment of information processes in the perception of emotional auditory stimuli and the relationship between attention and emotion. We are also developping Granger causality models in order to investigate the relationships between brain areas in the context of emotional perception. Music and emotion is also an important topic of research: we are conducting a series of experiments in the framework of the Social Interaction and Entrainment using Music PeRformance Experimentation european project (SIEMPRE).
Laboratory