William A. Cunningham, PhD
Professor
cunningham@psych.utoronto.ca
William A. Cunningham studies the cognitive and motivational processes underlying emotional responses. Current research examines how motivation and emotion-regulation (which can occur at both automatic and controlled levels of processing) contribute to emotional and evaluative states. This work suggests that affective states are constructed moment to moment from multiple component processes that integrate relevant information from various sources such as automatically activated attitudes and situational contexts. To understand these processes, his lab uses methods and theories from psychology (e.g., models of attitudes and latency-based evaluation measures) and cognitive science (e.g., biological models of emotion, fMRI/EEG methods, computational modelling).