Monthly Archives: January 2025

New Publications from Lab Members

Lab Members, Publications

Happy New Year & Happy Lunar New Year! We are welcoming the Spring 2025 semester with exciting new publications on emotion from our BABLab members.

Dr. Megan Edwards, BABLab post-doctoral fellow, recently celebrated two publications on hope and awe, currently in-press at Emotion and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin respectively.

  • Edwards, M. E., Booker, J. A., Cook, K., Gan, Y., Miao, M., & King, L. A. (in press). Hope as a meaningful emotion: Hope, positive affect, and meaning in life. Emotion. Pre-print.
  • Edwards, M. E., Mendenhall, K., Sanders, C., & King, L. A. (in press). Small but still significant: Awe and the Self. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Pre-print.

Cheryl Tan, BABLab co-lab manager, celebrated a paper on joy last summer, currently published online at The Journal of Positive Psychology.

We look forward to sharing more of the work that our BABLab members have been working hard on!

BABLab Receives Grant Funding to Investigate the Science of Empathy!

Grants

Congratulations to Dr. Van Cappellen for being awarded with grant funding from the Templeton Religion Trust! Dr. Van Cappellen serves as Principal Investigator, with BABLab post-doctoral fellow Dr. Kunalan Manokara as Co-Investigator, on this grant ($259,986) titled “The Science of Empathy: A Scoping Review”, a two-year project from November 2024 to 2026.

This project will evaluate the current state of the field on empathy research, guided by the following five strands:

  1. How is empathy defined and measured?
  2. What are the societal impacts of empathy?
  3. How is empathy situated re: related constructs?
  4. What is the role of religion in promoting empathy?
  5. How may empathy have a role in covenantal plurism?

Why empathy? Empathy is widely recognized by practitioners as essential for fostering peaceful relationships as it promotes interpersonal cooperation and intergroup peace. In an increasingly polarized world where division is exacerbated by ideological differences, cultivating empathy for different perspectives is crucial. This scoping review serves to organize conceptualizations of empathy, as well as related constructs such as compassion and love, in order to: integrate and evaluate new knowledge and robustness; identify gaps in the field; and suggest  new lines of empirical research.