My research interests focus on the role of emotion and attention in musical experience. I examine how these factors affect musical processing, performance, teaching, affective response, and meaning-making. Specifically, I am interested in how changes to attention and emotion as induced by contemplative practices such as mindfulness affect musical experience and how these factors may be studied using neurophenomenological and embodied cognition frameworks.
As a scholar, Diaz focuses on mixed-methods investigations of meditative practices and on developing theoretical models that might effectively deal with existing gaps between scientific and humanistic approaches to understanding contemplative practices.
