Jim Coan and the Hand Holding Experiment

Coan and others seek to detect and chart how moods and emotions are embodied in the brain, to map the nexus where the cognitive and the affective meet. Emotion, Coan says, is an organized set of physiological and behavioral responses to environmental stimuli. His research combines various disciplines to look at emotional expression and individual emotion-regulation capabilities, as well as the social regulation of neural processes underlying emotional responses.