People communicate emotions constantly. They express their emotions, intentionally and unintentionally, through their behaviour, language, and body; perceivers readily observe and interpret those expressions in others. These emotion communication dynamics are key to successful social interaction. The proposed project will capture these dynamics by adopting a panoramic, multi-modal approach to emotional communication: looking at how the same emotional experience is expressed in multiple streams (e.g., face-to-face and on social media), and is perceived by multiple observers (e.g., friends, romantic partners, and automated algorithms). This approach can go beyond existing research on emotion communication, which is stymied by attempts to isolate specific unimodal communication streams. The outgoing phase, which will take place at Princeton University, supervised by Prof. Diana Tamir, will use this integrated approach to examine whether the positive outcomes generally associated with emotional disclosure requires the disclosee to gain accurate understanding of the discloser’s emotions; to identify when different perceivers will be accurate vs. inaccurate; and to develop new algorithms for automated multi-modal emotion perception. The incoming phase, which will take place at the University of Haifa, supervised by Prof. Simone Shamay-Tsoory, will examine the neural mechanisms supporting the emotion communication processes studied in the outgoing phase. The project has the capacity to advance basic science in psychology, neuroscience and computer science, with multiple real world applications: distinguishing the roles of disclosure and accuracy, can help encourage healthy, beneficial disclosure; identifying relative strengths and weaknesses of communication modalities can help improve interpersonal accuracy, which can lead to better relationships; improved automated emotion assessment can help emotion research, clinical treatment, and emotion-aware software development.

This project proposes an innovative, integrative and data-intensive approach to understand the parameters for long-term sustainable functioning of complex societies under vulnerable conditions. The broad aim of the research is to explore contexts of collapse and resilience in an ancient society with high levels of socio-political complexity and technological ingenuity within a resource-limited environment. It focuses on the Byzantine early Christian urban centres of the Negev Desert (4th-7th cent. AD) disclosing both the triumph of human ingenuity in conquering the desert through large-scale human settlement and agricultural development as well as a striking and as yet ambiguous case of wholesale systemic collapse. To test hypotheses regarding social disintegration, economic stress, environmental degradation due to climatic or anthropogenic causes, and the question of plague the project integrates approaches in the archaeology of households, landscapes and garbage through use of biomolecular, botanical, zoological, geological, chronometric, artifactual and contextual sources of data. Dealing with societal vulnerability in marginal regions is timely and relevant in a world where accelerating development rapidly expands such problems, previously localized, to global levels. Although it is a risky endeavour to engage the record of past societies to inform the present and forecast the future due to the typically underdetermined nature of historical and proxy data, this project offers substantial gain to theoretical and empirical research on societal vulnerability in two main avenues: (1) providing an opportunity to critically re-evaluate the current state of knowledge in the field based on an extensive corpus of new, high-quality data and (2) drawing more nuanced and informed broad generalizations regarding limiting states for human ingenuity in reconciling social and economic development with sustainable management of the environment and its resources.

Social-science explanations for rising wage inequality have reached a dead end. Most economists argue that computerization has been primarily responsible, while on the other side of the argument are sociologists and political scientists who stress the role of political forces in the evolution process of wages. I would like to use my knowledge and experience to come up with an original theory on the complex dynamics between technology and politics in order to solve two unsettled questions regarding the role of computerization in rising wage inequality: First, how can computerization, which diffused simultaneously in rich countries, explain the divergent inequality trends in Europe and the United States? Second, what are the mechanisms behind the well-known observed positive correlation between computers and earnings? To answer the first question, I develop a new institutional agenda stating that politics, broadly defined, mitigates the effects of technological change on wages by stimulating norms of fair pay and equity. To answer the second question, I propose a truly novel perspective that conceptualizes the earnings advantage that derives from computerization around access to and control of information on the production process. Capitalizing on this new perspective, I develop a new approach to measuring computerization to capture the form of workers’ interaction with computers at work, and build a research strategy for analysing the effect of computerization on wages across countries and workplaces, and over time. This research project challenges the common understanding of technology’s role in producing economic inequality, and would thereby significantly impact all of the abovementioned disciplines, which are debating over the upswing in wage inequality, as well as public policy, which discusses what should be done to confront the resurgence of income inequality.