Components of emotional meaning

Johnny Fontaine made his PhD on the cross-cultural comparability of the Schwartz Value Survey at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium. He currently teaches psychological assessment and cross-cultural psychology at Ghent University in Belgium. Ever since his PhD he has worked from an assessment approach, with a particular focus on bias and equivalence in cross-cultural research. He is currently president-elect of the European Association for Psychological Assessment. He studies values, religiosity, acculturation, intelligence, and especially emotions from a cultural comparative perspective. His emotion research focuses on the structural representation of the emotion domain across cultural groups, on cross-cultural similarities and differences in self-conscious emotions, and on the assessment of emotional competence across cultural groups.

Klaus Scherer, born in 1943, studied economics and social sciences at the University of Cologne and the London School of Economics. Following his postgraduate studies in psychology, he obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1970. After teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and the University of Kiel, Germany, he was appointed, in 1973, full professor of social psychology at the University of Giessen, Germany. From 1985 to 2008, Klaus Scherer has been a full professor of psychology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and director of the Human Assessment Centre (Laboratoire dA?Evaluation Psychologique). Since 2004 he is the Director of the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences at the University of Geneva. Apart from extensive theoretical work (Component Process Model), Scherer's research activities focus on different aspects of emotion and other affective states, in particular emotional expression and induction of emotion by music.

Cristina Soriano studied English philology at the University of Murcia (Spain), from which she also obtained a PhD in Linguistics. She further studied at the University of California, Berkeley and Hamburg University, where she specialized in cognitive linguistics. Since 2007 she has worked at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences of the University of Geneva (Switzerland) as senior researcher on language and emotion. She conducts interdisciplinary research on cross-cultural emotion semantics, the metaphorical representation of concepts, the psycholinguistic investigation of conceptual metaphor, and the affective meaning of color. She is the executive officer of the GRID project and main researcher in a number of other studies on the linguistic representation of emotion concepts across cultures, with a special focus on conflict emotions.