Dear colleague,
We are pleased to announce the seventh edition of our International Summer School in Affective Sciences (ISSAS 2016), which will take place this year from July 7 to 15 at the Château de Bossey, an 18th-century manor house located in an outstanding natural environment overlooking Lake Geneva and the French Alps.
This year the central topic of the summer school organized by the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (SCAS) is “Emotion, fiction, and virtual worlds”.
A growing body of research is highlighting the potential power of new technologies such as virtual reality, robotics, videogames or human-computer interaction for health and learning purposes. Much of the current research, however, fails to bridge the gap between technology, virtual worlds and fundamental theoretical or empirical constructs such as emotions, immersion and reality, user engagement and related motivational aspects, as well as social interactions. ISSAS 2016 will address those gaps by discussing the role of emotions in fictional (e.g. novels) and virtual worlds (such as virtual reality worlds or videogames).
The scientific program for 2016 comprises plenary lectures from leading scholars in the field, discussions sessions and workshops aimed at theoretical integration and fostering new research ideas, group work in which the students design an interdisciplinary research project that will be presented and discussed on the last day.
The varied program and its hands-on orientation make ISSAS 2016 highly attractive to young researchers from different disciplines. In addition, they will enjoy an opportunity to form strong professional ties with each other, as well as with the invited faculty members. They can use these contacts to build a substantial scientific network even at an early stage in their careers.
We would be grateful if you could inform the students and collaborators in your group as well as interested colleagues elsewhere of this event. More information (including the application procedure) can be found on the ISSAS 2016 website:
http://affective-sciences.org/content/swiss-summer-school-issas
Yours sincerely,
Julien Deonna
On behalf of the Scientific Committee