The interdisciplinary research foci and transversal modules are:
- Aesthetic Emotions (investigating the important role the arts can play in the understanding of emotions, as suggested by several recent contributions from philosophers)
- Antisocial and Impulsive Behavior (the goal is to better understand the cognitive deficits and bias underlying antisocial behavior and to propose prevention and intervention programs in youth).
- Appraisal processes in decision making (appraisal processes underlying cooperation and decision making in economics, using economic games to study emotions).
- Empathy and prosocial behaviour in the lifespan (collaborations and scientific exchange between the members of the NCCR interested in development, empathy, and prosocial behavior).
- Gender differences (diagnosis of factors responsible for the relatively low percentage of women among the teaching and research staff in the social sciences, understanding of the socio-emotional correlates of gender differences, indication of how they affect academic careers, and generation of practical solutions).
- Language and culture (study of three issues : 1) Finding an interdisciplinary and interculturally viable concept of "emotion", 2) Conceptual and empirical investigation of emotion vocabularies and the semantic fields of emotion terms in living and dead languages, 3) Universality and specificity of emotional experience in different cultures and historical periods).
- "Self-reflective" emotions (eliciting conditions, experience-related aspects, and functions of self-reflective emotions in terms of their cognitive and motivational consequences).
