Meike Uhrig, Postdoc
Hometown: Heidelberg, Germany
Affiliation: University of Tübingen, Institute of Media Studies
What are you working on?
My field of study is the area of media and emotion research.
In my dissertation, I studied the representation, reception and effects of emotions in films, using popular movies as an example: I analyzed movies from different genres (Action, Romantic Comedy and Fantasy) for their potential to elicit emotions and tested their effects on different viewers.
Currently, in my postdoc-project, I focus on the representation and effects of faces and mimic in computer-animated films. In this context, I collaborate with disciplines such as psychology, informatics and medicine.
How are you going to find out?
One of the characteristics of my academic profile is my interdisciplinary background: I studied, worked and taught at the Departments for Film, Media and Communication Studies as well as Psychology and Medicine at Marburg, Mainz, Tübingen, Edinburgh (Scotland) and Stanford (USA).
Thus, in my research I use methodologies from the Humanities, the Social and the Natural Sciences, which include film analyses, quantitative and qualitative content analyses, FACS codings and surveys. I've also used psychophysiological methods such as electroencephalography (EEG), skin conductance response (SCR) and respiratory frequencies in an experiment in the context of a BMBF-project on emotions and pain perception.
How do your parents imagine your work in the lab?
I guess most people I know outside my field of work share the same idea about my job as media scholar. This includes my research (me watching films and series all day long), my teaching (me talking with my students about which films we liked and which films we didnt) as well as my publishing (writing pretentious texts that use fancy words that add up to entangled sentences about issues with a well hidden significance for the general public). Well, in the defense of the Humanities: I seem to recall Socrates facing similar reservations on the side of his wife.
Living in Tübingen is:
like living in Disneyland for scientists. Tübingen is an absolutely beautiful and cozy little town with an astonishing assembly of ingenious, renowned, international researchers conducting globally leading projects. You know the joke about three scientists going to a bar? This bar might most likely be in Tübingen!
