Department of Psychology
University of California, San Diego
I am deeply honored to have been elected President of ISRE. To fully appreciate why I feel as strongly about the Society as I do, it helps to know a little bit about the history of ISRE and my own path here.
ISRE began in 1984. Although the nature of emotions has been contemplated for millennia by poets, artists, philosophers, scholars, and just about anyone who has ever fallen in love, there was at that time no formal society devoted to the study of emotion or affective phenomenon. This was remedied when a group of researchers working separately on emotion decided to convene to discuss their common interests. Many of the world’s most prominent emotion theorists attended, including Klaus Scherer, Nico Frijda, Joe Campos, Paul Ekman, Bernard Rimé, and Francois Bresson, among others. This meeting of minds gave rise to our society, which has been in existence ever since. In the beginning, the organization was small and elite, primarily a place for senior scholars to exchange ideas. Over time, membership rules were broadened to include junior scholars and students. All the while it has remained the premier society for the study of affect and emotion, broadly construed.
My own route to emotion research was a bit circuitous. My involvement in research before going to graduate school had chiefly involved psycholinguistics, and for a time I assumed I would pursue graduate studies in this area. I had been fascinated to work with adult and child populations suffering from various cognitive disorders. As I contemplated my direction, I came to realize that my true interest in the research questions of psycholinguistics was rather limited. As we all know, to be a successful academic, one has to live and breathe one’s research. Eager to identify what areas of psychology would more fully capture my imagination (or perhaps my heart), I spent considerable time in the university library (yes, libraries were still a place that people went to back then) browsing journal abstracts. This is where I discovered emotion research – and I’ve been hooked ever since.
When I sought membership to ISRE, I was 5 years post-Ph.D. and had published work on emotion (both requirements at the time) but I still needed a sponsor who was a member.
Having not been reared in an emotion laboratory, I did not know other emotion researchers personally, although I had read a great deal of the emotion literature. My closest personal connection to the field, it seemed, was that Stanley Schachter was technically my academic grandfather. That didn’t seem like a promising connection to rely upon, however, since in my first year of graduate school I had presented on the famous Schachter and Singer experiment of 1962 and argued that the study was deeply flawed on both empirical and conceptual levels. Fortunately, more careful study of the ISRE membership list turned up a distinguished colleague in another department at UCSD, Roy D’Andrade. Roy spoke highly of ISRE and kindly agreed to help me out.
Becoming a member of ISRE was nothing short of thrilling to me. I could finally go and talk with other people who had similar interests. I could meet the very people whose work I had been reading for years. I found it an incredibly stimulating and welcoming place. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know anyone and that I had been a bit of a wild child, having educated myself about emotion independent of any particular intellectual faction in the field. I was eventually asked to serve as the editor of this newsletter. In doing so, I got to know many of the members of ISRE. After 5 years, I left that post to take on Editor of Emotion Review. These were not easy tasks, but they were rewarding and they helped shape in me a deep and loyal connection to ISRE.
And now I have the opportunity to serve as president. I tell this story partly to let people who come from underrepresented countries or fields, or who have been working alone in the area, or people who are new to emotion research and don’t know anyone, that this society is for you. While some academic organizations are filled with cliques that promote their own and dampen the voices of others outside their faction, I think you will find that ISRE is a strikingly open academic society that welcomes diversity and friendly debate in all of its various forums.
Articles on Health and Well-being
Health matters to us all and the older you get the more it will matter as its permanency becomes increasingly uncertain. This issue of the ER presents thought-provoking, well-written articles. They take very different approaches to the topic and underscore how much can be gained when we hear from people from different disciplines.
The first piece by Smyth, Nuebauer, and Russell brings up a number of excellent points that are useful not just to health researchers but to the emotion community at large. This piece highlights that emotions are dynamic processes that occur in particular contexts. It nicely illustrates that we can improve our predictive power when we consider that retrospective assessments of our own emotional experience can differ qualitatively from momentary assessments, with each measure potentially predicting different outcomes. I particularly resonated with the authors’ observation that intrapersonal variability can be informative. Most of us who employ traditional statistics tend to focus on averages with little thought to variability within or across individuals – unless that variability gets in the way of our crossing the p < .05 threshold. This article demonstrates that there are times when examining individuals or variability within an individual can be quite useful.
This point was brought home to me on a personal level when I was working on dread and temporal discounting. Previous studies had reported averages for how long people wanted to wait before undergoing unpleasant experiences. I discovered that almost no one in my sample fit the average. Instead, there was clear evidence of a bimodal distribution. Some people wanted to get their physical or psychological suffering over immediately, while others preferred to wait until the very last possible moment. Interestingly, when it came to money almost everyone was rational, seeking to postpone the loss as far into the future as possible and take the reward as soon as possible.
The provocative article by Julian Evans exquisitely illustrates how scholars from the humanities can help to keep our scientific thinking balanced. Otherwise, we are in danger of assuming that whatever historical or cultural context that we find ourselves in is the only possible context. Here, as in the previous article, we see the importance of recognizing variability in human experience. In a time where support for the humanities within universities is decreasing, we are reminded of how much we would lose, not just as scholars of emotion but as people, if we lost the best work emerging from humanities scholars. They remind us of the mistakes of history and of the origins of ideas; they grapple with morality, spirituality, and what it means to live a good and meaningful life, and they caution us against taking any single aspect of current doctrine and imagining it to be a panacea to cure human misery.
Exciting Things Afoot!
1) Our next conference will be held in Amsterdam next summer (beginning July 10, 2019). We are deeply grateful to Agneta Fischer, Disa Sauter, and Annemiek Hoffer from the University of Amsterdam for organizing the conference. Please note that submission proposals are due soon, November 12, 2018! The conference is sure to be intellectually stimulating and the city is a beautiful and fun venue. For more information, visit: https://www.isre2019.org
2) We are working on a new website and listserv for the society, which will greatly improve the functionality of everything from paying dues to seeing the latest emotion news. Searching for other members will also be a breeze. Speaking of which, I strongly urge you to complete your biographical information when we launch it. Membership searches can be used for all kinds of useful things, including looking for collaborators or authors for chapters or special sections in journals. When I was editor of Emotion Review, I used to wish that it was easier to search out members working in a particular field or on a specific topic to serve as authors of target articles, commentaries, or reviewers. We will now have that ability but it depends on you making sure we know who you are and what you do.
One of the late US Presidents, John F. Kennedy, famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” I’d like to alter that to say it is okay to ask what our society can do for you (answer = a lot) but you also might ask what you can do for ISRE. Our organization is built up of volunteers. Without people willing to give selflessly of their time, we would have no journal, no newsletter, no society, no conferences, no place to openly discuss the issues of emotion that we all care so much about. So, when the new website is up and you are asked whether you would be interested in volunteering in some capacity, please make a commitment to do so.
3) Our journal, Emotion Review, is doing fabulously, with a 5-year impact factor of 5.13. I strongly encourage people from different disciplines to join together to write pieces for it. The current issue focuses on brain research from different theoretical perspectives – well worth a look! One perk of membership is receipt of the journal so if you have not joined yet, this would be a great time to do so.
