Research on Emotion

My research on emotion is based on William James' (e.g., 1884) old theory about how emotions work. James claimed, contrary to common sense, that emotional behavior ("expression") is the cause, not the consequence, of emotional experience ("feeling"). Here's how he put it:

Our natural way of thinking about ... emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. (James, 1890, p. 449, emphases in the original)

[The entirety of James' Principles of Psychology, including the chapter on emotion from which this quote is taken, as well as many of his other publications and additional information about him is available at the following, wonderful site: http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/james.html]

Silvan S. Tomkins (e.g., 1963) modified James' theory, focusing primarily on the role of facial behavior in the production and differentiation of discrete emotional feelings. Tomkins' influence was such that the basic theoretical proposition came to be known as the "facial feedback hypothesis."

James D. Laird was one of the first psychologists to provide empirical evidence (Laird, 1974) consistent with the facial feedback hypothesis. Jim conceives of the link between emotional behavior and experience as one involving a process of self-perception (Bem, 1967; Laird & Bresler, 199x), and he and his students have shown that the basic mechanism extends to other emotional behaviors (e.g., bodily postures; Duclos, et al., 1989) and to non-emotional feelings (e.g., boredom; Damrad-Frye & Laird, 19xx). He has also demonstrated reliable individual differences in the extent to which people are responsive to their own self-produced cues of emotion (e.g., xxx, 19xx).

I had the very good fortune to be one of Jim's graduate students at Clark University in the early 1990's. My interests in emotion research have been focused primarily on specifying the parameters of emotional self-perception in normal adults (e.g., Flack, Laird, & Cavallaro, 1999a), and on applying this way of thinking about emotion to psychological disturbances thought to be characterized by difficulties in the expression and experience of emotion (e.g., schizophrenia, depression; Flack, Laird, & Cavallaro, 1999b).

This is Nate Deichert, one of the graduate students in our M.A. program, presenting the results of a recent study at the Eastern Psychological Association meeting in April, 2001. Natalie Brown, Kara Pursley, Katie Snyder, and Anne Willis were co-authors on this paper, entitled "Effects of disguised and undisguised emotional facial expressions on self-reported feelings and skin conductance." Click on the hypertext to see the abstract of this paper.

In some recent work, colleagues, students, and I have been investigating relationships between emotional self-perception and common problematic behaviors among college students, such as alcohol and nicotine consumption (Flack, Meil, & Hargleroad, 2001) and subclinical anxiety and depression (Turi & Flack, 2001).

This is Steph Turi (also at EPA, April, 2001, presenting work that she did with former Visiting Professor Mike Russell), one of my current honors students. She and I are currently conducting studies of emotional self-perception in undergraduate students who report high or low levels of anxiety and depression.

I am also interested in people's abilities to adopt emotional expressions (technically known as "encoding") and to make judgments of others' emotional behaviors (the stuffy term for it is "decoding") in both normal and abnormal populations (e.g., Flack, Laird, Cavallaro, & Miller, 1997).

More broadly, Jim Laird and I also co-edited a book on current theory and research on emotion in psychopathology (Flack & Laird, 1998) which, we hear, is doing pretty well for this sort of thing (we like it, anyway).