Arthur M. Jacobs

Arthur M. Jacobs is a Full Professor of General Psychology at the Free University of Berlin, where he serves as the Founding Director of the Dahlem Institute for Neuroimaging of Emotion (D.I.N.E.). His academic career spans several prestigious institutions including the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt and Philipps University of Marburg. He leads research in the Department of General and Neurocognitive Psychology within the Department of Education and Psychology at the Free University of Berlin.

Professor Jacobs earned his doctorate from Université René Descartes (Sorbonne, Paris V) with a dissertation titled "Le controle oculomoteur dans l'exploration visuelle: mecanismes sensori-moteurs et processus cognitifs" in 1986. His academic journey includes positions at the CNRS in France, RWTH Aachen, and several German universities before settling at the Free University of Berlin in 2003.

His research focuses on the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and literary studies. Jacobs has pioneered the field of Neurocognitive Poetics, investigating how readers process emotional and aesthetic aspects of literature. His work combines advanced neuroimaging techniques with computational analysis of texts, particularly examining Shakespeare's works, poetry, and emotional language processing. He has developed influential tools like the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) for measuring emotional responses to words. His approach integrates eye-tracking, fMRI, EEG, and computational modeling to understand the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying reading and emotional responses to literature.

Analysis of his recent publications reveals a strong trend toward computational approaches to literary analysis, with increasing use of machine learning and deep learning techniques to analyze text features, emotional responses, and neural correlates of reading. His work bridges humanities and neuroscience, creating a unique interdisciplinary field that examines how literary texts affect the brain and cognition.

Professor Jacobs leads the D.I.N.E. Labs, which include specialized facilities for fMRI, EEG, eye-tracking, transcranial magnetic stimulation, simulation, and near-infrared spectroscopy research. These labs support his research on emotional and aesthetic processing in reading, bilingualism, and neurocognitive aspects of literature reception.