BRIDGE, Penn State Emotion Research Network & the Department of Psychology present:

The Diversity Colloquia

Meetu Khosla, Ph.D.

Department of Psychology, University of Delhi

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

1:00 p.m. 2:10 pm 127 Moore Building

Understanding Emotions from an Indian Perspective: Implications for Well-Being

The socio-cultural experiences in our lives color the way we experience our emotions. I will elucidate the richness of emotional experience in the Indian cultural context. I will focus on how the yoga-sutras affect our lives, particularly through the rasa theory of emotional experience. Rasa theory is embedded in a holistic view of the human condition in which emotional experience is viewed in relation to coping with problems. The individual (jiva) is thought of as an experiencer (bhokta), whose positive as well as negative affect (bhoga) is taken as a wholea universe in itself (bhava-visva). The emotional life of the aspirant undergoes a gradual transformation, and (s)he begins to reside more and more in a state of pure and unconditional love, meaningfulness, and happiness. Dr. Meetu Khosla is the recipient of a Shastri fellowship for Canada in 2012 and ICSSR fellowship for France in 2013. She is currently a Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Scholar in the U.S. As part of her Fulbright work, she is teaching a course on Indian Psychology at St. Olaf University in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is giving a series of talks around the United States, such as Yale University Boston University, and others on a variety of topics related to culture, emotion and well-being. Her research interests include the study of emotion, happiness, emotional coping, emotional facial expressions and communication, and culture. She is the author of Physiological Psychology: An Introduction (in press, Tata McGraw-Hill) and numerous journal articles and other scholarly publications.